Ana Mendieta: Traces / Stopy

Exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery, London in collaboration with the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague.

During her brief yet prolific career, Ana Mendieta generated a uniquely inventive visual language that is at once intimate, provocative and compelling.

Mendieta was born in Cuba in 1948. In 1961, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, she was sent by her family to America. The pain and rupture of cultural displacement and exile – which she thought of as a sort of ‘orphanhood’ – would later fuel her creative process. Searching to find her place and context in the world, she embarked on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Her transient, almost immaterial ‘earth-body’ sculptures were private outdoor ceremonies and acts of meditation that she documented on film, or in photography.

Stephanie Rosenthal is Chief Curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, where her shows have included important group exhibitions, auch as Walking in my Mind and Art of Change: New Directions in China, as well as major mid-career retrospective of artists from Robin Rhode and Pipilotti Rist to Dayanita Singh. Solo shows included retrospective with artists such as Paul McCarthy, Allan Kaprow, and Luc Tuymans. She sits on the boards of a number of cultural institutions and her essays and criticism have been published internationally.