María Teresa Hincapié was a key figure in the development of performance art in the 1980s and 1990s. She first trained in theatre as a member of the Acto Latino group and was influenced by the ideas of the director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and the experimental horizon opened by his concept of “poor theatre”. Her training focused on discipline, the body and total awareness, with a simple, austere dramaturgy. This point of departure is what led her to the medium of performance in the late 1980s.

M. T. Hincapié’s long-form performances marked a seminal moment in the genesis of contemporary artistic practices in Colombia. She lived and worked with artists such as Doris Salcedo (1958), José Alejandro Restrepo (1959), Álvaro Restrepo (1957) and the Mapa Teatro artists’ laboratory, amongst many others on the Colombian contemporary art scene. Her early exploration of daily life, her transformation of routine actions into symbolic acts and her poetics of domestic life came together to produce a methodology for her performances in which the world of art infused all aspects of her existence, forming a nexus between creativity, ethics and politics.

In 1990 she was awarded the first prize in the XXXIII Salón Nacional de Artistas Plásticos de Colombia for her long-form performance Una cosa es una cosa [A thing is a thing]. This was the first time this award was given for an ephemeral, non-object work and to a woman. The action consisted of arranging possessions from her home in an exhibition space. Working intensely for eight hours a day over several weeks, she moved her body in a dance while reorganising the different objects according to changing criteria. She was awarded the same prize again in 1996 for Divina Proporción [Divine Proportion], an action in which she spent several days living in an exhibition space, planting and watering grass seeds in soil on the concrete floor.

The year 1995 saw her ambitious project Hacia lo sagrado [Toward the sacred], a 21-day journey on foot from Bogota to the city of San Agustin. Along the way, she combined acts of survival with symbolic and ritual gestures flowing from mystical thought, an approach which, from that moment on, was at the core of her poetics. Her practice became dedicated to a search for the sacred through basic, essential acts such as eating, fasting, observing, planting and walking, establishing a more intimate relationship with life itself.

M. T. Hincapié fostered the idea of sharing and creating community. In the late 1990s she founded a Village/School in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an artist-in-residence project she nurtured until the end of her life.

Her work has appeared in international exhibitions including The Body of Art, at the first Valencia Biennial (2001); Always a Little Further, 52nd Venice Biennale (2005); and the 27th Sao Paulo Biennial (2006). It is also held in collections such as that of the Banco de la República de Colombia, the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and the Barcelona MACBA.