If Ana Mendieta were alive today, she would be 76. One can’t help but be curious as to the works she might have made—and be making still.
A new exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City considers artists who have picked up where she left off and testifies to Mendieta’s enduring impact by arguing, uncontroversially, that she was ahead of her time and then gone too soon. One of the artists in the show, Vivian Suter, was born just a few months after Mendieta, and the contrast—between Suter’s contemporaneous career in its prime and Mendieta’s, truncated by a suspected-femicide-ruled-suicide—is a punch in the gut.
Suter and Mendieta share more than generational affinities. The latter was born in Cuba in 1948 and lived in exile in the US. She started making her famous “Siluetas” in 1973, pressing her body into the land and forming silhouettes—as if reaffixing her body to the earth might ameliorate her displacement. Throughout the show, bodily and earthly concerns are intertwined; so too are currents of feminism, ecology, and anticolonialism. Titled “Siluetas sobre maleza,” (“Silhouettes in the Undergrowth”), the show brings together six women from across Latin America. Their works share thematic and political concerns but vary in form and style, from Suter’s abstractions to Vivian Caccuri’s sound installation made in collaboration with ants who eat her speakers made of sugar.
Nohemí Pérez: El Ruido Del Hombre (The Sound of Man), 203.
Courtesy the artist.
Suter, born in Argentina to Swiss parents, fills a room with gargantuan unstretched canvases hung one in front of the other, like clothes on a rack. These works, stained with mud and dyes, choreograph one’s movement around the gallery (shared with Caccuri) in the absence of easy sightlines.
Outside this room, fire is everywhere. The show opens with Mendieta’s Alma Silueta en Fuego (Silueta de Cenizas) [Soul Silhouette on Fire (Silhouette Ash)], 1975, a Super 8 film in which a Mendieta-shaped cloth, its arms extended like a cactus, burns for three minutes in the dirt. The figure is set brilliantly and powerfully ablaze, but it is disintegrating into mere ash. On the heels of the recent US election, it is tempting to read this piece as a portrait of the futility of feminist fury, the way it rages on regardless. The piece, like the exhibition, is beautiful, affecting, and critical all at the same time.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: Times Come to an End, 2021.
Ian Byers-Gamber
The skies in Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s polyptych Times Come to An End (2021) are an apocalyptic orange engulfing scenes punctuated by fountains and debauchery. The work is reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights but swaps prelapsarian bliss for apocalyptic hedonism, beginnings for ends. Small figures enjoying a lesbian orgy are embroidered onto the canvas, as if to remind viewers that when the outside world is hell, the body can offer private pleasure.
Microcosm also meets macrocosm in Nohemí Pérez’s drawings: five monumental works that show forests on fire in the Catatumbo region of Columbia, which Pérez calls home. The drawings are done in charcoal, itself burnt wood. In the privacy offered by the trees, we see tiny figures, little worlds within this world: Venezuelan migrants seeking refuge, state officials extracting oil (illegally), paramilitary groups fighting for psychoactive coca. Tiny embroideries, easy to miss amid all the black smoke, show endangered beings falling perilously from the sky, suggesting that it’s much too late for the canary in the coal mine. The owls and the deer are already covered in soot.
