Regina José Galindo
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Galindo was born in Guatemala City in 1974, where she lives and works. Her artistic career is framed by the Guatemalan civil war that occurred from 1960 and 1996. This conflict was marked by genocide with more than 200,000 victims, many of them indigenous, agricultural workers, women and girls.
" I have only lived in Guatemala with a great violence problem, specially a limitless gender violence. During the armed conflict, the damaged to the female population was part of the war strategy to induce terror in the population, because when you kill a woman you also kill the chance for life. Currently, and since a few years ago, this is part of Guatemalan reality, but in higher numbers. Every day women are killed in brutal ways. Generally the bodies of men appear beheaded, or with a shot on the head, stabbed, or asphyxiated. But women bodies show evidence of rape and torture before being killed Regina José Galindo, 2007.
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Early work
Remarkably, for an artist who is known for the political themes of her work, Galindo grew up in a lower middle class household where politics generally, and the Guatemalan civil war more specifically, were not discussed. She attended secretarial school but her career as a secretary was not a successful one. Her work as a poet developed through attending workshops and groups which met in friends' houses, at which time she wrote the pieces that became part of her book Personal and Intransmisible.
Galindo started her professional career working in advertisement, according to her this helped her make better connections between images and words.
Her first steps in the artistic world where linked to poetry and drawing, getting close to the contemporary art world with other artists, especially Jessica Lagunas and Maria Adela Díaz. Aníbal López (also known as A-1 53167) has been a good friend for Galindo, and is noted as an important influence on her work.
She specialized in the use of performance art starting with one of her first works "Lo voy a guitar al viento" (I will yell it to the wind) in 1999. Her own body becomes the protagonist of her work, when she hangs herself from a bridge in Guatemala while reciting her poetry to denounce the atrocities inflicted on women under the abuse of political power.
With her work, Galindo has spoken up against violence, machismo (toxic masculinity) and one of the main topics is femicide, occidental beauty canon, state violence, and abuse of power, specially in the context of her country, even though her language relates to other contexts.
In her earlier work she used her body exclusively, sometimes subjecting herself to extreme situations and her interaction with volunteers or hired people that take the action beyond her control. Such as the work Himenoplastia (2004) where she went under hymen reconstruction surgery.
Performances
She first gave two performances in Guatemala in 1999, and gained international fame. One of her well-known acts include ¿Quién Puede Borrar las Huellas? (Translated: "Who Can Erase the Traces"), from 2003, in which she walked from the Congress of Guatemala building to the National Palace, dipping her bare feet at intervals in a white basin full of human blood as a vigorous protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala’s former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt.
Another of her notable works was titled Perra (2005), in which she carved the Spanish word perra, or bitch, on her legs, in protest against violence against women.
She frequently collaborates with other art performers, including compatriot Aníbal López.
List of solo exhibitions
List of group exhibitions
In October 2008, Galindo exhibited alongside renowned artists like Tania Bruguera and Jimmie Durham at MoMA PS1 for NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, an exhibition co-organized by The Menil Collection.
Between March 25 and June 8, 2014, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) exhibited a selection of Galindo's work in Estoy Viva. The show was divided in five sections: Politics, Woman, Violence, Organic and Death. Works such as ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?, 2003), Himenoplastia (2004), Mientras, ellos siguen libres (While they are still free, 2007) and Caparazon (Shell, 2010) were presented alongside newer works that had not been exhibited before in Italy.
In January 2020, Galindo was part of Artpace’s exhibit titled Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace. Curated by Erin K. Murphy, Visibilities not only kicks off the nonprofit's 25th anniversary celebration, but also highlights past artists from their International Artist-in-Residency program, such as Galindo who was a resident in Spring 2008. In Visibilities, a video that Galindo created during the 2008 residency is being showcased at Artpace for the first time.
Recognition
Galindo received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 2005, in the category of “artists under 30”, for her video Himenoplastia. This work, nevertheless, got a particularly hostile reception during its first showing in Guatemala, in 2004. The controversial work depicted surgical reconstruction of the artist’s hymen.
In October 2009, Exit Art showed a solo exhibition of Galindo's work as part of their SOLO series and Performance in Crisis program.
A book on Galindo’s performance work has been published in Italy (Vanilla Edizioni, 2006). Galindo is also a writer of poetry and narrative; in 1998 she received the Myrna Mack Foundation's Premio Unico de Poesía in Guatemala for Personal e intransmisible (Scripta Coloquia, 2000).
In 2011 the jury of the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Dave Beech, Christian Höller, Urška Jurman, and Ulay /Frank Uwe Laysiepen/) awarded her with the Grand Prize for the works: Confesión (Confession), 2007 which was produced in Spain and inspired by the extraordinary rendition flights uncovered by a team of local reporters in Palma de Mallorca, and the Prince Claus Awards.