On the occasion of the exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s paintings at Tate Modern, our Chair, Joanna Latimer, revisits her 2009 article Unsettling Bodies to explore the relevance of the paintings for creative health. She suggests how Frida Kahlo’s portraits challenge the Western idea of the “individual” as a self-contained, bounded entity and shows instead how Kahlo portrays persons as “dividual” – situated and composed through a gathering of relations that are simultaneously bodily, historical, cultural and political. By “staying with the trouble” of these complex relations, Joanna suggests that Kahlo’s work offers creative health practitioners a way to view their clients beyond simple medical labels, recognising the diverse forces that sustain and compose every human life.
Key Terms for This Essay
- Dividual: A term from anthropologist Marilyn Strathern describing personhood as composite and relational rather than self-contained.
- Assemblage: A gathering of diverse relations – such as history, technology, and anatomy – that bring a life into being.
- Biological Reductionism: A perspective that reduces a person’s complex reality solely to their physical or biological functions.
- Staying with the Trouble: A term from Donna Haraway – a practice of attention that refuses to simplify experience into easy narratives like “recovery” or “tragedy,” instead lingering with the complexity of life as lived.
Frida Kahlo’s return to Tate Modern offers an opportunity to linger with questions that continue to matter in creative health. Her self-portraits are often approached through the events of her life – a traumatic accident as a teenager, her monobrow, her disability and chronic pain, her relationship with Diego Rivera and daring sexuality, her miscarriage, her mixed heritage, her political commitment. Yet the paintings continue to exceed biography. They juxtapose worlds that modern Western imaginaries often divide: body and landscape, displacement and belonging, science and spirituality, the intimate and the political, nation and race, heritage and innovation, folk and ‘high’ art. These juxtapositions remain active, allowing different realities to coexist without collapsing into a single account of what a person is.
For those working in arts and health, Kahlo’s paintings offer a practice of attention that stays with the complexity of lives composed through multiple, often troubled, sometimes joyous, relations.
Relationality and the “Dividual”
In My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936), Kahlo presents a portrait of complex relationality. A red ribbon—resembling an umbilical cord, a vein, and a bloodline—gathers different lives, moments, nationalities and potentially opposing cultures and inheritances – German and Mexican. It includes multiple Fridas – her ‘self’ at the moment of conception, in her mother’s womb and as a young child. The portrait suggests that relations are not simply added to an already existing self; they are constitutive of personhood.
Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern uses the term dividual to describe this form of personhood. Kahlo’s work makes this term feel accessible and fresh by showing that what appears as an individual is already an assemblage: composed through relations that are material, historical, and political.
Sustenance and “Holding Together”
In contrast My Nurse and I (1937), Kahlo appears as the adult Frida suckling at the breast of her Mexican heritage – it asks: through whom – and through what – is a life sustained? The painting assembles relations of nourishment, indigenous labour, and colonial history, showing that a person is sustained by an assemblage of bodies and substances.
This theme continues in The Broken Column (1944). Often read as a portrait of pain, the painting can be seen as a body held together through material, medical and iconic relations—bone, a fractured Ionic stone column, steel, fabric, architecture, and landscape. It refuses familiar narratives of “tragedy” or “heroism”. Instead, it stays with the trouble of inhabiting a body whose boundaries are uncertain and which is neither autonomous nor reducible to impairment.
Practical Benefits for Creative Health
Viewing people as “dividuals” and “staying with the trouble” of their complex lives offers several vital benefits for contemporary health systems:
- Resisting Reductionism: It prevents health systems from oscillating between biological reductionism (seeing only the physical diagnosis) and psychological individualism (seeing only an isolated mind).
- Making Support Visible: It highlights that personhood is not imagined despite disability or illness, but through the histories, technologies, and environments that sustain us.
- Validating Complexity: It allows practitioners to recognize the lives people are already living in all their contradiction, rather than trying to “resolve” them into a single identity.
Conclusion
Kahlo’s portraits remind us that bodies, histories, and relations are never easily separated. Creative practices can help people compose realities in which other imaginaries of personhood become perceptible—ones that neither deny pain nor dissolve difference, but make visible the complex relationalities through which lives are continually composed.
At Tate Modern until 3rd January 2027 – Book now