This arresting work forms part of a 1970s photo triptych by the radical Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. In it, Maiolino appears to be in the process of cutting off her tongue, while in the other images she directs the scissors towards her nose and eyes—a fictional reenactment of the violence threatened (and endured) during Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship. Maiolino has described her work as striving “to notice and resist repression in an attempt to make anti-conformist, politically interventionist—and therefore revolutionary—art”, writes Charlotte Jansen for Elephant, in a 2019 feature exploring the artist’s love-centric agenda and the group of Latin American mothers who inspired it. Read more here.
