Ana Mendieta

A red trickle slowly dribbles into a woman's eyes from a seemingly self-inflicted head wound, until the screen goes dark. A newly slaughtered, headless chicken flaps uncontrollably as it bleeds out over the same woman's naked torso. These short 1970s films, 'Sweating Blood' and 'Untitled (Chicken Piece)' are gruesome bookends to 'Silueta and Silence' - amazingly, the first ever show to be held in this country of the influential Havana-born Ana Mendieta's fiery, bodily actions and chilling spiritual invocations.

Mendieta's painful performances disturb, but can also delight. She excavates herself from a live burial, her body pulsing into life as she dislodges herself from beneath a funereal rock pile. There floats the artist in a clear-water creek, seemingly dead but serene as Ophelia. Her martyred figure, an elemental, sepulchral vessel, is contrasted against the timeless, regenerative bloom of landscape in her 'Silueta' series - essentially the imprints leftover in a bed of leaves or a patch of grass after one of her endurance rituals.

Her Cuban heritage brings with it reference to the ancient Latin American god of Pachamama, or Mother Nature, but also the dark magic of the local branch of Voodoo, known as SanterÌa. Having been exiled to America as a child, Mendieta tapped into the plural and liberal feminist movement there, giving her a potent blend of creative freedom and primitive iconography.

Sticking as close to reverential museum treatment as a commercial gallery ever can, this display hides a surprise in a human-shaped grouping of 48 black candles that hints at her tragic early death aged 36 (she fell, or some say was pushed, from her New York apartment window) but does not sully her brazen body of work with such tawdry details. She stands defiantly alone.