In 1961, unaccompanied by their parents, 12-year-old Ana Mendieta and her sister emigrated to the US to escape the revolution in Cuba, where her father was being held as a political prisoner. Two decades later, she would describe this exile as a feeling of being “cast from the womb” – and her art practice as an attempt to “return to the maternal source”. Her dislocation from her motherland prompted her to seek a reconnection with the earth.

Mendieta, the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern in the UK this summer, is best known for her Silueta Series, begun in 1973, in which ...

 

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