No Direction Home

A soul divided, a woman without a country, Ana Mendieta died young and left behind a body of work suffused with a yearning that couldn't be soothed. "Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta," featuring 21 of the artist's short, mostly silent Super 8 films and videos, and three suites of photographs related to them, now at BAMPFA, has the effect of making viewers complicit in enigmatic rituals that feel simultaneously foreign and familiar. Her signature "earth-body" aesthetic, imbued variously with fire, water, animal blood and the cruel sting of abandonment and emotional amputation, penetrates the consciousness, and lingers there.

Born in Havana, Mendieta was one of 14,000 Cuban children sent to the U.S. as part of an American refugee program. Wrenched from her parents in 1961, at the age of 12, she lived in a succession of foster homes in the Midwest before attending the University of Iowa. Her art became a vehicle for reconciling her dual identities and healing a gnawing sense of displacement after being uprooted from her native country, culture and family, and thrust into a strange alien world. In films that both confound and captivate, one sees her attempting to salve old wounds through the physical merging of her body with the timeless natural landscape, connecting to the history of the earth and an irretrievable past. Whether she might have found her way "home," or what resolution, if any, she might have ultimately achieved, we'll never know. She fell to her death from the 34th floor of her Greenwich Village apartment and died at the age of 36 in what was deemed a tragic accident, though the actual cause has been the subject of speculation and a cause c�l�bre among some feminists. Her husband, sculptor Carl Andre, was charged in her murder, and acquitted.

In the course of an all-too-brief career from 1971-85, Mendieta worked across mediums in sculpture, drawing, installation, performance and photography, but her quietly hypnotic, original films - she produced over a hundred in the sprint of a single decade - have not garnered as much attention. They've been restored, digitized and transferred to Blu-ray, processes that have enhanced their pictorial quality. One or two are screened in loops on 10 projectors that ring a spacious, darkened room in the museum, a place of exile, cunning and silence (to paraphrase James Joyce) that allows the artist to cast her unsettling magic spell.

Mendieta's self and body are often front-and-center, whether she confronts the camera, smearing her naked body with blood ("Blood Inside Outside, Old Man's Creek, Sharon Center," Iowa, 1975), an act that suggests menstruation and the rituals of Afro-Cuban Santiera, or sets her silhouette on fire, which she has etched in white chalk on the ground, branded on trees or molded with underbrush and dried mud, then burned in a funerary rite on a riverbank ("Birth (Gunpowder Works)," Iowa, 1981).

Many of the films are only three or four minutes in length or less, yet they deliver intimations of mysterious, unseen forces at work of the kind ancient civilizations once spun into matriarchal earth cults. In the oddly affecting "Burial Pyramid" (1974), a piece she made in Yagul, Mexico, Mendieta is buried under a pile of boulders. As she begins to slowly shift and heave, as if awakening from a deep, potion-induced sleep and throwing off the shackles of time, several rocks roll away and expose her upper torso; we're left to wonder if she'll emerge a full-blown goddess.

"Creek," shot in Mexico the same summer, offers a vision of transporting peace. The camera hovers above an Edenic scene, where Mendieta, floating on her stomach in a startlingly clear mountain stream, is sheltered by a forest primeval, her arms extended alongside her head, her face turned to the side, her form supported by - and one with - the burbling water flowing downstream over her body. It's sublime, while "Mirage" (Iowa, 1974), one of the few works engaged with narrative, in this case her painful separation from her mother and homeland, is as visceral, profane and psychologically fraught as the latter piece is pure and serene. Apparently pregnant, sitting in a wooded glade and gazing into a mirror propped up in the grass, she reaches for a knife, cuts her stomach and extracts handfuls of feathers from her belly.

Fire is a recurring motif. That primitive, exhilarating and destructive earth element rears its head in the magnetizing "Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece)" (Oaxaca, Mexico, 1976). Announced by shards of light and ignited by a series of explosions, a fiery human form attached to an armature glows brighter and brighter in the night, triggering a raft of associations - a blazing effigy, a witch condemned to the stake, ritual sacrifice - before burning itself out and disintegrating into embers. The illuminated heart is the last to go. It's brief but spectacular, much like the career of the artist who created it.

Through Feb. 12. Info: Bampfa.org