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| Ana Mendieta, Ochún, 1981 |
Some exhibitions have magic to them. Like the current Ana Mendieta exhibition at Gropius Bau. I went through twice because I liked so much moving through the elegant rooms of Gropius Bau, darkened with the film projections - two, maximum three projections in each room. I visited on a Sunday, a hot April day on which everyone must have been outside because I was wonderfully alone with the art. It reminded me what a bliss art experienced in solitude can bring about. Somewhere in the middle I did meet A. and F. and we all felt raptured.
There was no sound to the films - at least not that I remember. There was also no chronology to the way the films were shown, just a bit here and there. But it was the first time I noticed the development of Mendieta's work: in her early work she performs with the body, the own body, including its blood, but later on, by the end of the 1970s, she leaves the body behind, reducing it to a mere silhouette, quivering in fire or water, and then in the 1980s, to just a trace. I very much liked the poetry of that last phase.