Ana Mendieta and Dayanita Singh at Hayward Gallery

An amazing opportunity to be led by Chief Curator Stephanie Rosenthal through the two retrospectives at the Hayward Gallery, charting the work of performance artist Ana Mendieta who died in 1985 and that of the Indian artist Dayanita Singh.
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban artist whose tragic death at the age of 36, for a time, overshadowed her life’s work. This exhibition is the UK’s first retrospective of one of the most significant artists of the late 20th century. In addition to films, sculptures, photographs, drawings, personal writings and notebooks, an extensive research room with hundreds of photographic slides will give unique access to works Mendieta could never show during her life.
A photographer, video and performance artist, Mendieta’s art was bloody and sometimes ritualistic, inspired partly by the Vienna Actionists, but also by her own Catholic background.  In the 1970s she created a powerfully visceral series of works about violence against women, in which she covered herself in blood and posed as victims of rape and sacrifice. Yet at the heart of Mendieta’s art was a greater concern about the transience of life, and it is this aspect that perhaps resonates most strongly with Dayanita Singh, the other artist showing at the Hayward.
Singh is perhaps best known for her haunting portraits of India’s urban middle and upper class families. Many of her photographs are exhibited as books, in which she alludes to stories that remain forever concealed in the margins.
Our tour will focus on the work of Mendieta, with an introduction to Singh which you will be able to explore in detail at your leisure.
Patrons: free;  Friends: £15;  Guests: £25.
To RSVP email rsvp@ukfriendsofnmwa.org and post cheque to Friends of NMWA UK, Box 539, 28 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3SS.