In this video, we will study the inception of Nahui Olin as one of the first performers in Mexico and perhaps the world. To navigate it, we suggest answering the following questions as you watch it:

What were the social and artistic consequences of her decision to divorce and live with Dr. Atl?
How did art flourish in her? Out of what need?
How do you think her behaviour in ordinary life became a practice on its own?
How do her writings allow us to see how she structured her view of herself and her creative life and practice?
What resulted from her collaboration with Edward Weston?
How can the pictures that he took of her challenge the boundaries between art and subject?
What do you think are the consequences of gestures like the ones Jean Charlot did, allowing her to co-sign his drawings?
What did she argue in her poem “I pose for artists”?
How did she precede the actions that future performers and body artists would take?
How did Nahui extend her performative practice towards her daily life? How would you frame and critically observe her manifestos and “graffiti”?
How would you observe critically her collaboration with the photographer Antonio Garduño? Why do you think she frames the exhibition as “hers” and not “his”?
Why do you think we need to observe her paintings alongside her performative and writing practice? What happens if we don’t? Do you think her work is naïve?
How did she make her paintings continue the conceptual line developed in her “modelling” practice?
How did she reinforce this other vision of womanhood in her poem “A Cancer That Stills Our Life”?
Why do you think she was later framed as a “witch”?
Why do you think her peers started to see her and her work as nothing more than a shadow of her past?
Why do you think I said that she was “alone” among the revolutionary women of the 1920s? What do you think is the difference between her and the life of Frida Kahlo and Maria Izquierdo, whom we have recently studied?
Do you think her work might have created the category of performance art?