‘A Ribbon Around A Bomb’: Frida Kahlo

Feminist icon, folk artist or surrealist?

Frida Kahlo turned her own image into a battleground.

Across her paintings, the body is split open, adorned, wounded and remade — a site of pain, desire and identity.

Drawing on Mexican traditions while forging something entirely her own, Kahlo created a visual language that is at once intimate and confrontational.

This lecture explores the life behind the image and the images behind the myth, asking why her work continues to feel so urgent, and so unsettling.