Ana Mendieta

Devoted to Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), this monograph appears with an exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, which brings together around 100 works from over fifteen years of production (1968–1985). The exhibition explores how the artist never ceased to reinvent herself through political and vibrant contemporary work, developing an original, ephemeral sculptural language, at times performative in act and informed by her research into primitive myths and rock art. It reveals her relationship to the visible and invisible, her way of rendering the unspeakable intelligible through traces of the body and its relation to nature.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.

What do gardens mean and how can they change the world? A Garden Manifesto gathers radical visions rooted in the earth from artists, writers, gardeners and activists, among them Lubaina Himid, Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, Ana Mendieta, Dan Pearson and Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s a seed box for an uncertain future, packed with anarchic dreams of Eden-making and humming with resistance to the colonial project of homogenisation and destruction.

Featuring William Blake, Joe Brainard, Jonny Bruce, John Clare, Gerry Dalton, Ellen Dillon, Baha Ebdeir, Alys Fowler, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Gaylene Gould, Green Guerillas, Joy Gregory, Fritz Haeg, Lubaina Himid, Philip Hoare, Rosie Hudson, Derek Jarman, Chantal Joffe, Laura Joy, Jamaica Kincaid, Elisabeth Kley, Olivia Laing, Jeremy Lee, Siobhan Liddell, Alison Lloyd, Hilary Lloyd, Jo McKerr, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Huw Morgan, Eileen Myles, Hussein Omar, Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, Ian Patterson, Dan Pearson, Jean Perréal, Charlie Porter, Pat Porter, J. H. Prynne, Claire Ratinon, Jamie Reid, Lisa Robertson, Kuba Ryniewicz, Saadi, Sui Searle, Sei Shōnagon, Colin Stewart, Tabboo!, Edward Thomasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Scott Treleaven, John Wieners, David Wojnarowicz, Matt Wolf and Sarah Wood

A novel in three parts, Sinkhole: Three Crimes submerges readers in a grotesque and comical world on the edge of collapse – much like our own. Britain is immersed in a toxic swamp, and sinkholes are opening up in the ground with alarming frequency. Amid the mayhem, three crimes take place: Stonehenge has been stolen, a porn-addicted ghost writer faces the phantoms of her past, and a murder takes place among ex-pats in a Goan village. 

‘An acidly funny vivisection of British mores and follies, delivered with razor wit and style. McLaughlin’s creative imagination is restless, wide-ranging and prescient, unveiling a terrifyingly plausible array of futures.’ – Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 

‘Sinkhole is a twisted dystopian satire that captures all the maladies of modern England – a sick and perverse nation – in hilarious, pin-sharp definition, as it slides back under the waves.’ – Huw Lemmey, author of Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell

Rosanna McLaughlin is an author and cultural critic. Double-Tracking, her debut collection of satirical essays and short fiction on the subject of middle-class duplicities, was published by Carcanet in 2019. An original proposal for the book was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize in 2016. Rosanna has written on subjects including Ariana Grande, the legacy of Section 28, and the weaponisation of Ana Mendieta. In 2017, she was writer-in-residence for the British Council Caribbean, researching the political fallout following Mendieta’s death. Her reviews and essays have been published in frieze magazine, ArtReview and the Guardian, among other places. She is co-editor of The White Review.

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

Including essays about Barbara Hammer, Agnès Varda, Camille Billops, Jane Arden, Penny Slinger, Ana Mendieta, Hito Steyerl, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, Carol Morley, Ulrike Ottinger, Charlotte Prodger, Charlotte Pryce, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Gloria Camiruaga, Margarethe von Trotta, Astra Taylor, Lina Wertmüller, and more.