This intimate exhibition of Ana Mendieta’s work, curated by Cuban compatriot Wilfredo Prieto on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the artist’s death, revolves around three short films that intertwine absence with presence. Perhaps the most distinctive of the three, X-Ray, ca. 1975, records the artist’s X-radiated skull, her jaw moving up and down to rehearse a speech test. The work’s clinical imagery contrasts with the closeness of Mendieta’s voice, here somewhat childlike. Flower Person, Flower Body, made the same year, deepens the idea of understanding the body through its lack. If in X-Ray we visualize a body’s dark, medicalized interior, in the second film we see the outline of a human form, made of flowers, branches, and fabric, floating away in water, a clear reference to Santeria. An interest in ritual is felt, too, in Weather Balloon, Feathered Balloon, 1974, in which a weather balloon full of plumage rises, meteor-like, and explodes, its contents falling back to Earth to gently scatter. The bobbing shape in Flower Person, Flower Body and the strangely heartbreaking descent in this work share a poetics of lightness, all caught on tactile, wistful Super 8. The footage is accompanied by a series of drawings produced while Mendieta lived in Rome from 1983 to 1985. The quick sketches and rubbings—some with written notes, others on creased pages—lend the show an atmosphere of playful privacy, heightened by the voice coming from X-Ray but also by the handwritten postcards on display. The exhibition’s title—“Tropic-Ana”—furthers that sensibility: It was how, in a pun, Mendieta signed the missives she sent to friends and family.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.

— Joaquín Jesús Sánchez