Conceptual formations between the ideas of body, identity and contemporary art - Ana Mendieta "Glass on body imprints"

The conceptualization of the body as an identity has been appreciated in art for a long time, and there are many artists who work using it as a tool of expression and as part of their discourse. Already for the latest artistic tendencies such as performance and art in multidisciplinary media, the body is raised from its everyday life to a political discourse and criticism. Carmen Hernández (2006) believes that "In contemporary art, the body ceases to be a form of inspiration capable of expressing a concept of beauty and desire, to be configured as a pretext for research on subjectivity and the social structure that shapes it".

For man the body is the primordial resource that allows establishing human relations of communication and identification, in the case of contemporary art the body becomes an ideological construction as part of a language that goes beyond the merely aesthetic, if not deepening towards a cultural and social perspective, as Hernandez explains, this is why, if we look at some of the works of contemporary art, we can notice the artists' interest in representing the body as a social manifestation, as is the case of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, where we can appreciate a visual discourse focused on the body, and how it is approached from critique to symbolization, as in the case of one of her first series "Glass on Body Imprints" which consisted of a photographic record of the action of pressing his face and body parts against a piece of glass to appreciate the deformation generated by this action, linked to the issue of gender violence and other issues of repression against women.

Mendieta's work focuses on themes related to the transcendence and unity of the human with nature, we can appreciate in her different series (where the body and face are an essential part using it as a poetic discourse) her approach to social critiques regarding gender identity and the sense of belonging from the autobiographical aspect due to the migration of her youth from Cuba to the United States. In the artistic field there are many visual and discursive languages that artists develop, in the case of artists who work with the body we can appreciate how they present it from the symbolic dimension as the case of Ana Mendieta.