Abstract:
For Ana Mendieta, who spent her childhood in an orphanage and foster families because she was sent to the USA due to the Cuban revolution, the racism and harassment she encountered during her education are important factors affecting her artistic life. Identity, roots and the body are among the main elements of her works. In Silueta series, one of her most important works, the artist carried her body to nature and focused on the relation between birth and death through the traces created by her body in nature. Like many artists of that time, she documented her works, in which she utilised natural materials and cultural rituals, with photography and video. This method of documentation both makes her performances visible and maintains her sculptures, which she considers to be the basis of her work, as an object of art. Mendieta's works contain a wide variety that cannot be handled under a single movement or style. Analysing the artist's works through different art movements helps to better analyse her understanding of art, as well as to understand the impact of the art movements that influenced the period on the artist's works. In this direction, in Mendieta's Silueta series, the female body conceptualised with the methods and materials used by the artist and the traces left by the body in nature are examined through Land Art, Process Art and Arte Povera. The main reason for choosing these three movements is that they use natural materials as a common point, focus on their connection with each other by considering art and nature together, emphasise the temporality of time and time and prioritising the experience of space.
