She made avant-garde films, was an expert in dance and worked as an ethnologist and anthropologist during her travels to Haiti in the 1940s and ‘60s. We are talking about Maya Dern, a master of experimental cinema to whom the building in Montcada street of the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món is dedicating an exhibition between 27 February and 7 September (from Tuesday to Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sundays and holidays). Sundays and holidays, from 10 am to 8 pm. Admission is free until 9 March).

It is ‘Maya Dern. Una cadència d’imatges’, an exhibition curated by Ainize González that presents the figure of Maya Dern (1917-1961, born Eleonora, she changed her name herself) and her work in a multidisciplinary way, using the languages of cinema, literature, dance and spirituality, all of which are an inseparable part of her work.

The exhibition focuses on Maya Dern’s cinema, but also on the trips she made to Haiti between 1947 and 1955, thanks to a Guggenheim grant that enabled her to film more than six thousand metres of film that she never managed to assemble.

The artist was born in Kiev in 1917, but his family moved to New York in 1922. She studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University and was secretary to the dancer, anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham. In 1943 she shot her first short film, Meshes of the Afternoon (pictured, © All rights reserved by the artists / Courtesy of Light Cone), the beginning of a career devoted to film and dance, that of her time and also of other cultures. She travelled to Haiti to research Haitian voodoo rituals and her research resulted in a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, and the album Voices of Haiti, released the same year, which includes new soundtracks of Haitian dances and rituals.

Dern was the author of six film projects of an experimental, speculative, intuitive, poetic, symbolic and visual nature. The exhibition moves through these poetic images with the appearance of an unfinished audiovisual production in a visual and almost choreographic way, but avoiding a chronological or biographical character.

If you would like to find out more about these and other aspects of Maya Dern‘s life, personality and artistic career, come to the Ethnological and World Cultures Museum‘s Montcada Street branch, but first you can find all the information you need on the website.