Ana Mendieta review – were she still alive she’d be at the forefront of art in this century

Tate Modern, London
This exhibition makes nothing of the Cuban-American artist’s controversial death – instead it focuses on the astounding way she left an imprint of herself on the earth using blood, feathers and gunpowder

A huge colour photo of a ruined ancient site greets you outside Ana Mendieta’s engrossing exhibition and it immediately tells you this is going to be different. It’s the kind of thing that seems to belong more to a British Museum show about a lost pre-Columbian civilisation than in the concrete citadel of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing. Yet in her imagination, that’s where Mendieta belonged, too. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the US when she was 12 to flee the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. Home, for her, was the past, and she would excavate the very origins of art and mythology.

Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight. The flames leave behind a scorched shadow of a person, like the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii entombed in ash. Confronted by a row of these burnt ghosts emerging from real tree trunks you almost expect them to speak to you like the shades of the dead.
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