PARIS.- The exhibition Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta is the first museum exhibition devoted to the filmworks of this highly acclaimed Cuban-American artist (Havana, 1948 - New York, 1985). Bringing together 20 moving image works and 27 related photographs, the exhibition is the largest gathering of the artist’s filmic work ever presented as a full-scale exhibition in France.

Ana Mendieta is widely regarded as one of the most prolific and innovative artists of the post-war era. The recent exhibitions devoted to her work in Europe (Berlin, London, Prague, Salzburg, Turin and Umeå) revealed the power of her artistic vision and the influence of her work on the generations of artists that came after her. Mendieta’s work continues to have a strong impact on people of all ages and backgrounds.

During her brief career, from 1971 to 1985, Ana Mendieta produced a remarkable body of work, including drawings, installations, performances, photographs and sculptures. Lesser known, her production of films and videos is particularly impressive and prolific: her 104 filmworks produced between 1971 and 1981 make Ana Mendieta one of the leading figures in the practice of multidisciplinary visual art that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to new research into Mendieta’s work in the filmic medium, the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume repositions the moving image from the periphery to the centre of her work, and is organized around the recurring themes explored in the films, including memory, history, culture, ritual and the passage of time, which are often distilled through the relationship of the body and the land. The majority of Mendieta’s films take place in nature and often feature her interest in the four classical elements: earth, water, air and fire.

During the 1970s Mendieta travelled to Mexico nearly every summer, where she made many important artworks. The themes of memory and history are introduced in Silueta del Laberinto and Burial Pyramid, both produced in Yagul, Mexico, in the summer of 1974, in which, Mendieta defines her unique earth-body aesthetic by merging her body with the land and the ancient culture it symbolized. The exhibition presents these films together with Mirage, 1974, and Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978. Mirage explores personal memory through the story of Mendieta’s separation from her family in Cuba, by means of a dual narrative relating the mother-daughter relationship. Untitled: Silueta Series reveals Mendieta’s interest in the ritualistic aspect of art and the transformation of the earth into a sacred space.

The exhibition includes four films from a series of eighteen Mendieta made between 1972 and 1975 that incorporated the use of blood as an artistic material. These films explore the themes of the body, identity, gender, and ritual. Sweating Blood, from 1973, is the only film that features Mendieta’s face in extreme close-up, seen through an attenuated sense of time. The exhibition includes one of the rare films in which Mendieta is seen writing out a declarative statement by hand: Blood Sign, from 1974. Blood Inside Outside, made in 1975, is an astonishing psychological study of autonomy and vulnerability, rendered with unflinching honesty. Corazón de Roca con Sangre, from the same year, presents a ritualistic narrative of spiritual redemption in which the stone heart of the artist is magically brought to life in the merging of the artist’s body and the earth.

The themes of earth, fire and the tree of life are presented at Jeu de Paume through a collection of seven films shown together in the same gallery. Mendieta used fire in 38 of her films. Birth (Gunpowder Works), from 1981, is a wonderfully graphic film in which the dried, cracked mud and the light of the Iowan landscape give birth to a dream of artistic magic and power. Three films made in 1979 are presented together in a related arrangement: Volcán, Untitled: Silueta Series (No. 72) and Untitled: Silueta Series (no. 73). In the first, the artist uses the form of the volcano as a metaphor for the earth as a site of solace and disaggregation. In the second, a silueta shape burns inside a cave-like structure Mendieta has also carved into her silueta form. The third burning silueta in this group brings together in one abstracted form the component selves of earth, body and tree.

Mendieta described the tree of life as one of her enduring themes. It is presented at Jeu de Paume in a grouping of three related films. In Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978 (No. 62), we see a tree in the Iowa landscape; three hands magically appear as the tree burns, forming the silueta. Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece), 1976, is one of the most memorable artworks to emerge from the 1970s. The silueta shape, floating vertically in the night sky over Oaxaca, Mexico, may be seen as a tree of life sharing its light for the time it takes to burn itself out. Energy Charge, 1975, has a mysterious, ritualistic, Gothic sensibility.

The work has a performative component and combines video and 16 mm film to present the idea of the tree of life.

Jeu de Paume presents a sequence of five films, which seen together in the gallery illuminate Mendieta’s personal, political and spiritual biography. Water figures prominently in 19 of the 104 filmworks made by Mendieta, where it functions as a metaphor for spiritual unity. Creek, 1974, filmed at San Felipe Creek in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a sublime work of art, deceptively simple in its composition and dissolution of traditional narrative structure. In Silueta de Arena, 1978, the silueta figure appears in place of the artist’s body; it is the idea of the body. The water in this film has patiently burnished the figure’s surface.

The three last filmworks in the exhibition, all made in 1981, form a trilogy on the relationship between displacement, return and reconciliation. Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) is the epic cycle of sculptures that Mendieta carved into the limestone walls of the Cuevas de Jaruco. A journey through real and metaphorical time, this film marks Mendieta’s return to Cuba and her link with the ancient myths of the Jaruco Caves. Untitled takes place on the beaches of Guanabo, near Havana. Here, Mendieta speaks of the longing for her homeland and the extended time of separation. Ochún is a video produced off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida. The silueta figure here points towards Cuba, the waters between Florida and Cuba rippling through its form. Ochún, who owes her name to a Santería goddess, transforms the pain of separation into a restrained poem made of colours, light, movement and sound.

The exhibition includes the documentary short film Ana Mendieta: Nature Inside by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta. This film features rarely-seen images of the artist and a voice track of Ana Mendieta speaking about her work in a lecture she gave at Alfred University in 1981. Nearby in the Jeu de Paume gallery is a vitrine with film-making ephemera and equipment, curated by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta.

Curators: Lynn Lukkas and Howard Oransky