Each year in December, millions of Catholics embark on a pilgrimage.
They come from all over Mexico and beyond.
Their final destination is a church in the Northern Quarter of the capital, Mexico City.
In a very public display of painful self-sacrifice and atonement,
the most devout of these pilgrims approach the last miles on their knees.
Many of them cling to the image they carry on their back.
It's one of the most famous works of devotional art in the world.
The image is the Virgin of Guadalupe,
and she's revered by Mexico's 100 million Catholics.
She offers grace and protection to all who worship at her shrine,
and the image has transcended religion to become one of the country's most unifying symbols.
But this image was borne out of brutal conquest that changed the course of
Mexican and world history.
It symbolises the eradication of Mexico's ancient cultures by the might of
the Spanish and the imposition of Catholicism.
It was one more turn for a country whose history and people have been
propelled by three main forces...
..land and nature,
which have been both the source of life and the cause of conflict and
death since the earliest times...
..the struggle for power,
which has defined this nation's history over millennia,
and faith, in Mesoamerican gods and Christian iconography,
which has been ever-present throughout its existence.
They are the beats,
rhythms and currents of Mexico, and they run through my blood.
As an artist born here and with roots stretching back generations...
..I want to take you on a journey through these three great stories that have shaped
not just Mexican art, but Mexico itself.
And in this programme I explore how faith, ancient and modern,
has been a constant driver of all Mexican civilisations.
The power of art to provide a focus for belief in Mexico didn't begin
with the Virgin of Guadalupe,
but it is a vital image in understanding how art has provided
an unbreakable link between religion and the Mexican people.
As an artist,
I was inspired and overwhelmed by the ritualised expression of devotion to
the Virgin and the infinite reproductions of the sacred image the pilgrims carry.
I decided to photograph individual pilgrims to explore the deeply personal
relationship between image and belief.
So this is the series I made over the course of two years at the
Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City,
specifically during the days of the Apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
And this is significant because there's eight million people that go there
every year, and I was one of those eight million.
Now, Mexican devotees have at least one image of the Virgin in their home -
in their bedroom, in their living room, in their dining room -
and they take their image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
I could see the Virgins on people's backs turned back towards me and
they looked like they were dancing,
and I started photographing the backs of the pilgrims carrying their personal Virgin.
Each one has a completely neutral white space around them, which
echoes the Resplandor, which is the light around the Virgin.
So this is the flower that we use in Mexico at Christmas, Noche Buena,
and he's decorated it with Christmas flowers.
Here are the roses from the Apparition, and he's done this graffiti himself.
And I just think this one is full of energy and full of his personality,
and he's wearing Nike red trainers to match.
For me, this series is a deconstruction of the philosophical,
psychological and sociocultural need for an image in order to believe.
What is it as visual beings that makes us crave images, need images,
in order to feel a connection to the divine?
The original image of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs in this modern
basilica, where it still draws millions of pious Catholics.
It was painted in the 16th century,
most likely by an indigenous painter who would have been retrained in a
new European style by Franciscan monks.
PRAYING
When Spain conquered Mesoamerica,
part of their mission was to convert the people to Christianity.
Art was one of their most persuasive tools.
To the Catholic Church, the Virgin of Guadalupe is more than art.
They believe this image came about through miraculous contact with the
Holy Mother herself.
This miracle was aimed at convincing the indigenous people to embrace a new religion.
According to Mexican Catholic tradition, one day in December 1531, Juan Diego,
an indigenous farmer, was making his way to Mass through Tepeyac Hill,
the sacred site of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin,
when suddenly before him appeared a vision.
It was the Virgin Mary.
She appeared three more times over the course of four days.
On the last apparition,
the Virgin instructed Juan Diego to collect the roses from the top of the hill.
He was very surprised by this instruction because actually it was December
and the hill was usually barren.
But when he arrived, it was plentiful with flowers.
He collected and folded them into his tunic
and took them to the Bishop.
When he arrived,
he unfolded his tunic to reveal not only the roses but also that the image
of the Virgin had imprinted itself onto the tunic.
This is a miracle of the Apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
When she appeared in the early 16th century,
the indigenous people were incorporated into the Catholic religion through a miracle.
From that moment, the Virgin became embedded in this new world.
She was invoked in the rallying call that triggered Mexico's War of Independence in 1810.
And 100 years later, in the Mexican Revolution,
rebel forces also marched under her banner.
She transcended religion and has become emblematic of Mexico itself.
It's paintings and sculptures of the Virgin that Catholics worship.
In return, the Holy Mother provides comfort and protection.
This concept wasn't strange when she was introduced to the people of Mesoamerica.
Their religions had developed over thousands of years and included the
worship of male and female deities,
who helped them overcome adversity and solve their problems.
Many of their gods represented the vital forces of rain and wind,
war and wisdom, death and fertility.
And some deities, similar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, stood supreme.
The Great Goddess, a mother goddess,
was a principal deity of one of the great city states of the ancient world.
Between 100 and 600 AD,
Teotihuacan had an enormous religious influence across all of ancient Mexico.
Nearly 700 years after it fell,
the ruins were a place of pilgrimage for the all-conquering Aztecs.
They believed the city had been built by gods.
And you can see why.
It's vast, designed to swamp the individual in an overarching cosmic
vision expressed through some of the most remarkable art and architecture
in the world. A three-mile long processional way is flanked by monumental
pyramids dedicated to the sun and the moon
as well as a huge walled square where the people would gather for
religious rituals.
The far end of the square is one of the most striking and ornately
designed buildings in all of the Americas, el Templo de la Serpiente Emplumada -
the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
The Feathered Serpent was a formidable deity that had associations with
power, war and nobility.
The construction of this temple in the third century is thought to have
signalled a shift in the power balance within Teotihuacan and the rise of the cult
of the Feathered Serpent.
And to demonstrate this cult's power, 200 people were sacrificed,
including high-status warriors.
Blood, the essence of life, was offered in return for this god's favour.
The cult commanded their artisans to design a structure that placed their
authority at the very heart of Teotihuacano belief.
Artisans were kept close to power in Teotihuacan.
Their ability to bring deities to life was considered a supernatural act in itself.
Even after its fall,
Teotihuacan continued to command spiritual influence over succeeding civilisations,
particularly the Aztecs, who worshipped many of the same deities.
At the beginning of the 16th century,
this long religious and artistic tradition came to an abrupt halt.
Spanish Conquistadors, under the command of the adventurer Hernan Cortes,
landed on the shores of Mesoamerica in 1519.
They were intent on plunder, but they did so under the banner of their religion, Catholicism.
This work of art is called El Lienzo De Tlaxcala, The Linen Of Tlaxcala.
It's an indigenous account of the darkest event in the history of the sacred city of Cholula.
In the course of one day in 1519, the Spanish killed thousands here,
looting treasure and burning temples.
A final humiliation after this massacre was the construction of a
Catholic church on top of the city's sacred pyramid.
This marked the emphatic arrival of a new world view that would forever
alter the nature of belief in this part of the world.
From Cholula, Cortes
and his men marched towards their ultimate goal -
the capital of the all-powerful Aztec Empire.
This is all that remains of a once great city.
And it lies at the heart of Mexico City.
THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE
They're opening a water duct
so that the water streams down and doesn't erode the existing structure.
Underneath Mexico's capital lies another capital called Tenochtitlan.
It was the centre of the Aztec's spiritual world,
the very axis between their heavens and their underworlds.
At its height in the 16th century,
it was said to have been home to as many as 200,000 people.
When the Spanish first saw this city in November of 1519,
its scale and beauty astonished them.
It was likened to Venice because the city was crisscrossed by a series of canals.
And its great temple, dedicated to the god of war and rain,
rivalled the cathedrals of Sevilla and Cordoba.
It's now only in art that we can see the full grandeur of this city
because, admiration aside, the Spanish reduced Tenochtitlan to rubble.
BELLS TOLL
It's amazing to see the cathedral
right over the walls of the Templo Mayor.
There was a total destruction, a mission to destroy Aztec civilisation,
and you can really see that here because the same stone that came from the
Templo Mayor, the centre of the Aztec world, built the cathedral.
The same materials, the same building techniques, the same families,
the same people, built both.
It's quite emotional, actually, because I don't think you feel anywhere in
Mexico the clash of civilisations as much as you do here.
And I think it's a reminder that spiritual conquest was an imperative
of the Spanish colonial project.
And that led to the destruction not only of the belief system but all
the material culture that went along with that, and...
..it fills me with sadness, actually, that all this was destroyed.
These ruins may well have remained lodged in sediment forever had it
not been for one night in the 1970s.
Electrical workers were digging deep under the streets of Mexico City when
suddenly they hit a massive stone block.
This monolith, 11 feet across, is called the Coyolxauhqui Stone.
It's a masterpiece of Aztec art, central to their belief in human sacrifice.
Carved into the stone are the remains of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui.
She was a force of darkness that fought every day against her brother,
the god of the sun. The Aztecs worshipped the sun and rejuvenated him with
their own blood. Each day began with the sun killing the moon,
dismembering her and throwing her body parts from the top of a high mountain.
So the placing of this monolith at the foot of the stairs of the great
temple was highly symbolic.
The temple represented the mountain and, during some calendrical
festivities, sacrifice was conducted on top of the temple and the victims
were thrown to the platform,
and they were, like, re-enacting the death of Coyolxauhqui.
And who would have carved her?
The sculptures were a very important part of the Aztec Empire because
they were in charge of putting the gods in the stone.
What is also important is that we are seeing this monolith, but we
need to imagine her all painted.
Wow. She was colourful.
You can see she's dismembered...
..so she represents all these rituals, sacrificial rituals,
and also you can see in her belly this folding,
which means she was a mother.
Wow. So she is connected to fertility, to the moon, to the world.
For the Aztecs, the art was, you know, commingled with the religion.
They were not producing for the people, they were producing for the gods,
to put the gods on the Earth, to re-enact the myths.
So it's more complex than art.
This is a wall of carvings of human skulls, and the archaeologist that
found them found them scattered around the area of Templo Mayor, and put them back
together to mirror a wall of real skulls.
They were a reminder of the human sacrifices that had been made,
the animal sacrifices as well.
Jaguars, pumas and wolves were sacrificed along with humans.
Catholic missionaries described the Aztecs as being skilled in the
mechanical and liberal arts and as being perfect philosophers and
astrologers, but their religion was said to be inspired by the Devil.
It was ritual human and animal sacrifice that
was diabolical in their eyes.
And it served as a pretext for one of the most brutal campaigns of
iconoclasm in world history.
Catholic missionaries evangelised the vanquished indigenous people
whilst burning their religious artefacts.
The items that survive give us a picture of the colour,
vibrancy and complexity of the indigenous religion.
The Spanish knew that conversion of the indigenous people could not be
achieved through coercion alone.
They retrained the artisans of Mesoamerica to create art in a European style
that would help spread a new message -
art could only serve Catholicism in the land that was now called the
Viceroyalty of New Spain.
The Spanish claimed that it was religion and not plunder that was
the driving principle of the conquest.
The church immediately set about changing the skyline of their colony.
Pyramids topped with temples were replaced with churches and steeples
topped with a cross.
The construction of Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral spanned three
centuries and incorporated Renaissance, neoclassical and baroque styles.
This opulence wasn't borne out of devotion alone.
The high demand for lucrative exports of silver,
indigo and chocolate quickly made this colony the jewel in the Spanish crown.
The Catholic Church was given a considerable role in the new colonial state.
It grew rich from collecting tithes on all agricultural production, and
this gave it the political and financial clout to dominate the art of the colony.
This is the Altar of the Kings. It's florid,
fantastic and the design is overpowering.
Standing over 80 feet tall and almost 50 feet across,
it's the backdrop that projects the dominance of the Church in New Spain,
where priests would celebrate the Eucharist -
the symbolic but bloodless sacrifice of Catholicism.
The altar is built in a style referred to as the Ultrabaroque -
an even more exaggerated version of the overwrought and ornate style of
the Baroque. A key motif of the Ultrabaroque is the estipite -
inverted obelisks that are used in place of traditional weight-bearing columns.
The effect is to give the impression that the entire altar floats.
Like most architecture and art in New Spain,
the Ultrabaroque was an imported style.
The Church wanted artists to produce exact replicas of European works.
But within the cathedral, there are extraordinary 17th-century paintings by
an artist born and raised in the colony who managed to develop his own
artistic language, even when working within the strict confines set down
by the Church.
His name was Cristobal de Villalpando.
Cristobal de Villalpando was one of the best painters that Mexico,
New Spain, produced.
In my mind, probably the best painter...
..that lived and worked in New Spain.
He is the painter that best represents...
..what would be Baroque in Mexico.
I think the painter he's most akin to is probably Rubens.
In terms of being a painter in a Catholic Spanish context,
they would have been similar because Rubens, of course,
was working in Catholic Flanders, which was governed by Spain.
So they would have had some of the same sorts of subjects to deal with -
the glory of the Church, the glory of the monarchy, this sort of thing.
What would you say makes his work Mexican?
He never left Mexico.
What he knew about painting he learned here, and how he developed,
he developed here. He starts out as a painter who is much more linear -
that is, one can see outlines clearly of his figures.
With time, outlines of the figures are not as important as the
brushstrokes or as the play of colour.
For centuries, in a room where the vestments and articles of worship
are kept, priests have prepared for mass surrounded by some of the most
glorious art of the Spanish world.
It's amazing.
We're in the sacristy of the Cathedral of Mexico City, and actually one of
the oldest parts of the building, the vault, is a Gothic vault.
So this was built in the late 16th century.
And here, over the door...
..is a glorious painting.
It's a very famous painting by Cristobal de Villalpando.
It's the Apotheosis of Saint Michael, the Archangel -
of course the protector of the Church.
The whole point of this space is to make one statement after another about the
glory of the Church in general and the glory of the Mexican Church in particular.
Is it a coincidence that Michael's wearing Mexico's national colours?
They are also the colours that correspond to the three cardinal virtues.
Red is for charity, white is for faith, and green,
which of course refers to vegetation, the hope of new growth.
It's not only a glorious painting and tells us that he's a very great artist,
but he also puts himself in the painting.
There's a figure who is not a cleric,
he's dressed in black and has a smaller white collar,
and that's a self-portrait of Villalpando.
He's looking straight out at us,
which is an identifying sign for self-portraits,
and below in the bushes there there's a scroll, and it has on it a
signature that Villalpando made this and Villalpando invented this.
Villalpando's assertion of originality in his work was
a sign that artists in New Spain wanted their artistry and individuality
to be reflected in their work.
It was the very beginning of a distinct national style.
Artists would still look to Europe for inspiration, and their commissions
would still be dominated by the Church,
but their work was inspired by their life in this colony.
Miguel Cabrera was a deeply religious man who was one of the leading
artists of 18th-century New Spain.
He was commissioned to paint a copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was
presented to the Pope in 1754 -
an act which marked the increasing importance of New World Catholicism.
He also painted portraits that captured the secular luxury as well as the
blossoming intellectual life of New Spain.
His most famous portrait hangs today in the Natural History Museum and
features a remarkable woman.
This woman is a nun.
Her name is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a unique woman -
unique in intelligence, talent...
..and personality.
I think it's the most brilliant mind...
..extraordinary mind in all Mexican history.
Born into poverty in 1648 and raised by her grandfather,
she was a precociously intelligent child.
By the age of eight, she was writing poetry, and by 13 she had mastered
Latin and Greek.
Stating that she was averse to marriage, she became a nun,
where she could devote her life to God but also commune with ideas and knowledge.
She wrote poetry and plays,
one of which provocatively questioned the brutal treatment of the Aztecs
as well as showing sympathy for indigenous beliefs.
It strikes me that her nun's badge is very large.
Why do you think that is?
Maybe Miguel Cabrera wants to emphasise...
..the scene of the Annunciation.
The Virgin Maria...
..renounced the every day and common life to become the Mother of God and
is the parallel to Sor Juana when she renounced to be just a woman
and became a nun.
Cabrera captures the essence of a woman who devoted her life to spiritual reflection.
She's not impassive or meek but confident and fired by an
endless intellectual curiosity.
In this painting, she was looking to you.
Mm-hm. But you don't know what she's telling you.
Mm.
Maybe she was asking you why you are looking at her.
At the time this painting was made,
what was the relationship between artist and commissioner?
The artists made that commissioners want.
The artist put the technique, the commissioner put the composition.
The commissioner made all the details because Sor Juana, in this case,
Sor Juana was the hero of the convent.
And the commissioner wanted to emphasise that Sor Juana was the
most important nun in that convent.
Sor Juana, Miguel Cabrera and Cristobal de Villalpando were notable individuals in the
development of a distinct artistic and intellectual tradition in New Spain.
They were Creoles - people of Spanish descent who were born in the colony.
By the 18th century, a separate Creole identity emerged...
..one more sympathetic to the indigenous population.
Here, an anonymous painting from the 17th century depicts the Aztec Emperor
Moctezuma as self-sacrificing.
He holds his hand to his chest like Christ showing his wounds to his
disciples as he relinquishes his crown and sceptre to an unseen but
higher Christian authority.
This free interpretation
of New Spain's history was not exclusive to an intellectual elite.
Indigenous people had never relinquished certain aspects of their beliefs,
and they were weaving them into the cultural foundations of the colony.
Wherever you go in Mexico, such as here in the city of Goma,
there's always reminders of how this country's precolonial past endured
and transformed.
Muchas gracias.
So this is a pre-Hispanic drink made out of cocoa, amaranth, maize,
cinnamon and water.
And she uses this mixer.
Mm. It's absolutely delicious.
It's like really good hot chocolate, but it's cold.
It's really fresh.
The Europeans added sugar cane to chocolate,
a small example of how two cultures clashed but also mixed.
This blend played out all across new Spain,
most explicitly in the mestizos,
the mixed raced children of Spanish men and indigenous women.
But it was also evident here in the Church of Santa Maria Tonantzintla,
an extravagant articulation of faith drawn from Mexico's distinctive
wellspring.
The church is dedicated not just to the Virgin Mary,
but also to the Aztec mother goddess, Tonantzin.
It was built in the 17th century and from the outside, it appears modest.
But what makes this church so remarkable is the interior.
It's a design that defies description.
The walls and the ceilings are completely covered in painted and
gold coated plaster work.
It's an almost overwhelming avalanche of detail.
Indigenous artisans were needed to build the many churches throughout new Spain.
These craftsmen worked to European designs but they interpreted them
and fused with pre-Hispanic aesthetics.
Aztec religion was almost eradicated by the Europeans.
The last Aztec ruler, Cuauhtemoc, was tortured by the Spanish,
not because of his beliefs, but because they were convinced he was
holding vast amounts of gold.
He beseeched his people to surrender their material wealth
but never their core beliefs.
The unforeseen consequence of a relentless campaign to eradicate
indigenous belief was the fusing of two competing religions.
The indigenous people incorporated their religion into Christian ritual
and ceremony.
It was often camouflaged and unnoticed.
The church of Santa Maria Tonantzintla is a remarkable example
of how architecture allowed the teachings of a forbidden doctrine
to hide in plain sight.
It wasn't until the 20th century that these pre-Hispanic belief
systems would be officially embraced and reinterpreted by the Mexican people.
Modern Mexico evolved over 200 years,
beginning with the War of Independence from Spain in 1810,
and then the long and bloody revolution in 1910.
What finally emerged from these conflicts was the establishment of a
cohesive national identity.
Not one dictated by the church, but by a group of intellectuals and
artists determined to celebrate and not deny Mexico's ancient cultures.
From this generation, an artist of global significance emerged.
Diego Rivera.
Diego Rivera was a giant of 20th-century art.
Most famous for his monumental murals that captured the spirit and
imagination of post-revolutionary Mexico.
His work is densely packed with a formidable grasp of his country's history.
His ambition went much further than murals.
When Mexico City was overhauling its water system in the 1950s,
it felt it needed the touch of an artist to cap the project.
The commission fell to Rivera, who drew from Mexican history, the
most appropriate figure to anchor this municipal work - an ancient rain god.
The result was La Fuente de Tlaloc, the fountain of Tlaloc.
Tlaloc was known in central Mexico and all the pre-Hispanic societies
as the God of water, the creator of all life, of course,
and one of the deities most important god in those cultures.
Do you think Diego Rivera was trying to be provocative to the Catholic
Church by invoking a pre-Hispanic god in this fountain?
Well, he was provocative in all his career, of course.
Pre-Hispanic figures and pre-Hispanic gods were something
all Mexicans can relate to, and as the pre-Hispanic societies
were the best of these new nationalism, I think Diego Rivera
was thinking about Tlaloc as someone who all Mexicans can relate to.
And, of course, he was very close to archaeologists
and anthropologists at the time who were studying pre-Hispanic cultures.
At that time, the studies, the archaeological studies,
were quite avant-garde by the time,
so that's very interesting to see how that became a national symbol.
Water is symbolic everywhere but can you explain why, in particular, in
Mexico it's such a strong symbol?
Well, you have to remember we are in Mexico City and Mexico City is built
over a lake, so, always it is part of our identity as a city
and as a country.
Diego Rivera thought about this fountain to be seen from above.
Actually, he was thinking about people passing on aeroplanes and
seeing this fountain, so the figure is very dynamic
if you see it from above.
But this fountain marks only one half of this artistic project.
There's another aspect to this work.
A vast water tank where the water flowed to the city.
And even though they would be submerged underwater,
Rivera was asked to bring his genius to bear on these walls.
Rivera always surprises me with how he brings together apparently...
..unlinked things and people and objects.
Here, we see sea life and just above that, an engineers' table,
scientists working out how they're going to provide water for the
millions of people in Mexico City.
We see the deity, the pre-Hispanic deity of water.
We also see the workers.
The men and women who helped build these amazing structures.
Rivera's water tank is a secular hymn to the glory of human endeavour.
He's asking us to celebrate the labour of these workers
whose hard graft and knowledge brought water to the capital.
He draws on the iconography of religion to add history and scale to
his work. But for him, it's the people and not gods that realise the
wonders of modern Mexico.
The once immense power of the Catholic Church diminished
throughout the 20th century.
However, Mexico is still deeply devout and religious imagery remains
ever present.
There's one popular art form in Mexico that allows an individual
to combine devotion, gratitude and narrative into a
deeply personal expression of faith.
An art form that begins with a desire to give thanks.
This place is called The Corner Of Miracles because a man
witnessed a car crash near his house and wanted to offer thanks for the lives saved.
The thanks he offered was in the form of a painting that has long
been the preserve of the poor, often rural population.
What he painted is called an ex-voto, a traditional offering of
gratitude dedicated to one of the many Catholic saints venerated in Mexico.
The painter is Alfredo Vilchis and still every day, he paints for
those wanting to give thanks.
Sure.
At the heart of ex-voto painting is a combination of a shared ritual
tradition alongside intimate struggles.
The sincerity, vibrancy and freedom of this art spoke
to a generation of modern artists.
They also saw an opportunity to reject the rigid formality of
religious painting by embracing the naive style of ex-voto's.
One artist whose work incorporated the confessional and symbolic nature
of ex-voto was one of the most celebrated in the world - Frida Kahlo.
Much of Frida Kahlo's life was spent suffering from the complications of
a near fatal and crippling pelvic injury,
as well as the after effects of childhood polio.
Through sublimation,
her suffering became art with a deeply spiritual dimension.
Her house is now a museum to her life and work,
including some of her 2,000 strong collection of ex-voto paintings.
At the time, the church didn't value these objects as sacred art
or even as art at all, and she imbued them with value because she
saw the human story behind the image and she not only empathised
with them, but she really related to them.
It's really important to remember that she was surrounded by these
works when she was making her own.
And she also had a need to express.
The ex-voto is really born out of a need for someone to express
their gratitude.
So it's no wonder, really, that she had such a strong relation to them.
It takes a lot of courage to remember and commission...
..a traumatic incident such as an accident or an illness and have the
humility to thank the saint or the virgin.
There's a huge sense of not forgetting within an ex-voto,
of having that constant reminder that you went through this crisis.
Frida was in that situation.
She was physically very, very hurt after her accident and this was a
constant source of physical pain.
Her relationship with Diego Rivera is famously a painful one,
so all of these emotional and physical traumas were expressed in a
very courageous way, I believe, for I feel a great courage behind them.
At the Delores Olmeda Museum in Mexico City, there are two works of
Frida's in particular, that show how the motifs of
ex-voto paintings enabled her to portray her suffering at a time of
inconsolable loss and pain.
Monica, can you tell me about her painting the Henry Ford Hospital?
It was a painting made in 1932.
It was made while Frida Kahlo was joining Diego Rivera
in Detroit while he was painting some murals.
And she had a miscarriage, so that was really,
really a strong experience for her.
She drew herself in the painting sort of right in the moment
where she was having the miscarriage.
So she also drew six little umbilical cords coming out of her
that depicted some elements that talk about the strong experience
that she was going through.
Following the ex-voto tradition,
Henry Ford Hospital was painted on tin.
Frida fills the frame with religious references.
She suffers like the holy mother from the death of her son.
On the floor beside her bed is an orchid, an ancient symbol of fertility.
Above, a snail, an Aztec symbol of birth and rebirth.
But she breaks with ex-voto tradition in offering
no thanks to the divine.
For me, the most interesting thing about the painting is what is not
there, actually.
One would expect a virgin or a saint to be in a place
where it is actually blank, so I think it's really a moment
where she takes a position that she was going to use the ex-votos as an
inspiration but put a lot of herself in there.
As well as a physical torment in her life, Frida also suffered
emotionally throughout her marriage to Diego Rivera.
When his philandering was at its worst, she expressed her anguish
with bitter irony in the form of ex-votos.
She's talking about a man that stabbed her wife because she was being unfaithful.
She read about this crime that this man committed and she sort
of related to it because Diego Rivera was cheating
on her with her sister.
You can see the blood also coming out in the frame.
So I think that was also what fascinated Frida Kahlo
about the religious painting, that reality and non-reality
was always really just getting along in the same space.
Frida was a Communist, suspicious of the church.
But her work was deeply spiritual.
The iconography of both Christianity and indigenous belief took root in
Frida's secular world.
But where others looked without, towards a divine, she looked within,
finding solace in her art.
This spiritual dimension still permeates Mexican art.
Today, the power of Mexico's unique religious iconography remains a rich
source of metaphor.
It can now be used to ask challenging questions about the
nature of worship, how we value belief in a global consumer culture
and how we place the frivolous on equal footing with the divine.
Religious kitsch and pop icons have been fused together by one of the
most distinctive voices in Mexican contemporary art, Dr Lacra.
My intention was to create, like, a religious object that you can
worship and I also think that many of the toys or pop iconography
I'm using, in a way is also full with ideology and with religious.
I think pop is a religion, in a way.
Yeah. I think the mythology is always, in a way, connected to religion.
The way they are assembled together, they
refer a little bit of totem poles...
Yeah. ..and the tree of life or amulets.
I'm not religious, I...
I think that's one of the reasons that I can make these
and make fun of many, like, figures and play freely with these.
Not so long ago, this man from Thailand came and he was shocked to see,
like, the Buddha with the ET head or some people make really weird
questions about, why did you use the image of Jesus Christ in that way?
In a way, some people think it's disrespectful.
But I think to get the things of each religion that you like and then
make a new philosophy or new religion or...
Just play with that iconography.
Dr Lacra's playful take on worship harks back to Mexico's unique
mixture of Christian and indigenous belief.
There always has been and always will be a deep communion between art
and religion in Mexico.
Throughout its history, artists have brought Gods to life
and connected us personally with the divine because, for me,
it's art that satisfies our need for images to make faith tangible.