Mira Schendel and Ana Mendiata: Latin American exiles

There are two shows in London at the moment which feature women artists with backgrounds in Latin America and displacement ; while one was exiled to Brazil, while the other was exiled from Cuba, both were profoundly affected by their experience. Mira Schendel was born Switzerland of a Jewish family, but brought up in Italy. In 1938 fascism meant she was stripped of her Italian nationality, and she fled first to the Balkans and then to Brazil, where she became a leading proponent of modernist art. Ana Mendiata was sent to the USA from Cuba by her family as a 13-year-old, and thus cut off from her birth culture at a young age, a loss she partly assuaged by developing an interest in the related culture of Mexico. She died tragically young, having fallen (?) out of a window in the apartment she shared with her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre (who says he cannot remember anything about what happened).



One of Mira Shendel transparent mobiles

I have to admit I did not really take to the Mira Schendel exhibition at Tate Modern until Room 8 of a 14 room show. Up to that point, the works lacked appeal for me - paintings with not much in the way of colour, shape or reference for my taste, though they did seem to have more depth on a second viewing. From Room 8 more of the works were three-dimensional, and I found these easier to relate to - delicate floating strings and curtains, transparent suspended rectangles filled with black letters. I gathered she was obsessed with philosophical ideas around being and nothingness, and I could imagine these works as representing the door between the two. I'm not entirely convinced visual art is the best way to explore these themes, however, but then this is not my field of interest in any medium. Nevertheless, I can see why her work become iconic in Brazil - it appeals to the melancholic Portuguese strain of Brazilian culture, as well as bringing Brazil into the international artistic fold, as did other European exiles at the time. All the same, pointless as it is to
complain, I was rather disappointed
that her work doesn't seem at all "Brazilian".

The other artist, Ana Mendiata, was one of that group of female artists who use their own bodies as part of their art (Anthony Gormley is the only male artist I can think of that does this). She photographed herself as the victim of a brutal rape and murder (a real incident which happened to a fellow student), or lying on the ground partly covered with earth and becoming one with the landscape. She visited Mexico and became fascinated with its pre-Colombian past, using it in her images. She was clearly concerned with violence to women, and with the relationship of females with nature. Her work is often grotesque. When she died she was developing sculptural work, using natural wood and tree trunks; throughout her short career she was constantly exploring new themes and one can only imagine how she would have developed if her life had not been cut short. I preferred Mendiata's literal "down to earthiness" to Schendel's fragile otherwordliness, although neither is really my kind of artist, on the basis of the works in these shows at any rate. But yet again, I'm pleased that I can stay in London and have all the world's art brought to me to mull over.