by William Kherbek // Sept. 11, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Performativity.
“Where is Ana Mendieta?” It is a question that has become familiar over the last decade. Jane Blocker’s 1999 book by that title is regarded as a critical point in the reassessment of Mendieta’s artistic legacy and subsequent understandings of her work, and a belated reckoning with the reality and the meaning of her (extremely likely) murder by Carl Andre. Artists and activists ranging from the Guerrilla Girls to the Where is Ana Mendieta Movement (WAM) to Sisters Uncut have been working to ensure that Mendieta’s life means more than the grisly circumstances of her premature death. Fittingly, performance has been at the center of that process. As detailed by the writer and curator Hana Janečková, recent protests around the inclusion of Andre’s work by major art institutions have been targets of “reperformances” of earlier protests by activists asking “Where is Ana Mendieta?” London’s Tate Modern was the subject of one such protest by Sisters Uncut in 2016, when the building hosted a work by Andre in its new expansion, then branded as “Switch House.” In 2026, in the same building—now branded as the Blavatnik Building in recognition of donations by the billionaire investor Len Blavatnik—the question of where Ana Mendieta is has at least a partial answer: she’s at the Tate. In one sense, this is an affirmative result from activist pressure. It remains to be seen, however, whether the show bearing Mendieta’s name will lead to more than a performative reassessment of her importance within contemporary art in the long term. But for the moment at least it becomes possible to explore the question of what Mendieta’s presence means in a space like the Tate.
Ana Mendieta: Imágen de Yágul,’ 1973 // Copyright The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London
Impressively expansive in scope, the show offers considerable insight into the centrality of performance in Mendieta’s practice. Perhaps more than anything else, the exhibition demonstrates how critical Mendieta’s presence is to experiencing her greatest and most powerful works. The “silueta” is the form by which many will know Mendieta’s works: the human form created by the artist using her own body as model and measure. The form appears throughout the exhibition in different iterations, and quite significantly in different reproductions.
Entering the show, in the section designated as ‘The Cave’ by the curators, the viewer encounters the silueta across a variety of forms and materials. In her book on Mendieta, Blocker invokes the significance of performativity in relation to these works across a number of discourses, in particular gender and nationality. Citing Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha and other ascendent critics of her time, she writes that nationhood is itself a kind of reperformance of certain narratives. Mendieta’s reperformances of the silueta in different spaces, as Blocker notes, challenged both the concept and the act of establishing such hegemonies. For me, the most powerful siluetas in the show are those that are the most formally and materially resistant to fixation and closure. For example, in the powerfully evocative ‘Ochún’ (1981), the form is placed in water, creating a kind of channel through which the surrounding water flows and merges back into itself. This fluvial dynamic expresses the malleability of the silueta as a form, and in its display, as a film projected onto the wall using original film stock, the power of time as an aspect of Mendieta’s work. The strange shimmer of the water, creating a dazzling effect that is almost stellar in its brilliance and uncanniness, is an effect created by the tension between recording technologies; obsolete cameras, digital mastering, these visible limits also create an almost cosmic aura to the work that feeds powerfully into the narratives that animate Mendieta’s art. The effect of reproduction and technology is increasingly present in the depictions of the siluetas across the show. Photos of siluetas and other earth works appear in reproduction from the 1990s and from the 2010s. Especially in the later digital reproductions, a third dynamic enters the dialogue between earth and the body established by Mendieta: the presence of technology. The high spec new reproductions of the siluetas are intensely detailed, but they create a distancing effect; they become a reminder that there are places we will never go and things we will never see. What will future reproductions mean for those moments of Mendieta’s presence in the 1970s and 80s, one wonders. How much further will we feel from Ana Mendieta then?
Ana Mendieta: ‘Untitled Silueta Series,’ 1976 // Copyright The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London
The sense of distance, for me at least, felt like a critical component of Mendieta’s works, and of their meaning in the present. The room entitled ‘The River’ features Mendieta’s now-classic films including ‘Grass Breathing,’ ‘Blood + Feathers,’ ‘Sweating Blood’ and video footage of the creation of two siluetas. Followers of Mendieta’s works will know most of these pieces, the dramatic ‘Blood + Feathers’ that features Mendieta covering herself in blood and then rolling in chicken feathers, evokes, as Lucy Lippard notes in her book ‘The Pink Glass Swan,’ the “white cock”—a Cuban spiritual fetish that inevitably has multiple associations, both transcendent and sublunary, in the context of Mendieta’s concerns. Syncretic religion is heavily present in this room, not least in ‘Sweating Blood,’ which features a close up of Mendieta’s face as blood begins to appear on her scalp, a certain variation on the phenomenon known among Christian mystics as “stigmata.” The blood works bring the drama, but it is perhaps the quieter ‘Grass Breathing’—in which Mendieta is positioned under a strip of sod on a grassy meadow—that made the strongest impression on me, bringing together as it does earthly, cosmic, compositional and performative elements. Mendieta’s subtle movements under the grass are initially almost invisible unless one knows where to look, but once the rhythm is established they become hypnotic and surreal; it is a work that achieves both comic and existential significance.
‘Ana Mendieta,’ 2026, installation view at Tate Modern // Artworks © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, photo © Tate (Yili Liu)
The exhibition also features some of Mendieta’s very early painted works. A small section hung with canvases is found near the rather unfortunate reconstruction of the Old Westbury ‘Untitled Silueta’ (1978)—there is a whiff of McDonaldland, despite the best efforts of the curators, around these physical reproductions of outdoor works. The canvases are quite interesting in dialogue with the more performative works by which they are surrounded. In themselves, they are raucously colorful, but as a wall text elaborates, they speak to a kind of limitation: Mendieta felt she needed a bigger canvas to work with, and the residue of presence that painting represents did not suit the robust immediacy of her most powerful works. Her paintings have an intense fauvish approach to color—here one might think of Alexej von Jawlensky or Fauve-era Matisse as points for reference—but ultimately they are perhaps too formally readable to express the most encompassing aspects of Mendieta’s concerns.
Ana Mendieta: ‘Untitled,’ 1969 and ‘Untitled (Self-portrait),’ circa 1970, installation view at Tate Modern 2026 // Artworks © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, photo © Tate (Yili Liu)
Nevertheless, Mendieta did return to painting at other times, as the exhibition represents with a series of siluetas on leaves from the 1980s. These representational works always feel a bit forced, a bit overdetermined for as expansive a vision as Mendieta’s. Indeed a much more effective take on abstraction can be found in a video work towards the end of the exhibition, ‘Bird Run’ (1974), which trains a camera on a shoreline. What appears initially as a placid seascape is suddenly disrupted when Mendieta, covered in white feathers as the “white cock” again, comes running up the beach. Without the title to work with, “bird” wouldn’t be the first association that would come to mind, but the exuberant presence of life is unmistakeable and the very unreadability of the figure creates one of her most unforgettable works. It challenges concepts of figure and representation and the painterly frame much more robustly—and with more humor—than her canvases.
Ana Mendieta: ‘Bird Run,’ 1974 // Copyright The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London
The exhibition ends with a quote from Mendieta, in which she states that the “obsession” in her work is to “reaffirm myself in this world.” Perhaps more than any other element of the exhibition, the indispensability of Mendieta’s presence to her work radiates throughout. In this sense, Mendieta has triumphed. But, standing at the exit door of the show in the Blavatnik Building, one cannot help but feel that it is inevitably a triumph in tragedy, one that belongs to Mendieta’s story, to our own and to the wider world of art and creation.
Exhibition Info
Tate Modern
‘Ana Mendieta’
Exhibition: July 14, 2026–Jan. 17, 2027
tate.org.uk
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK, click here for map
