Regina José
Galindo
Author: Mariana
David
ArtNexus No. 60 - Mar
2006
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For the inauguration of
Prometeo gallery’s Lombardy location, the
Dominican Republic-based Guatemalan artist
Regina Galindo presented a sober but forceful
new work. Sitting on a chair facing the viewer,
with her legs uncovered, Galindo cut into her
skin with a knife, writing the word “perra.”
Meaning “whore” in Spanish, this word has been
found on the bodies of brutally murdered women
in several Latin American cities, the best known
cases being Guatemala City and the northern
Mexico town of Ciudad Juárez.
Regina
Galindo uses conceptual art strategies from the
1960s and 1970s—working on her own body, with
organic materials, and in public spaces—to talk
about the reality of life. The displacement of
these artistic strategies to a problematic
context such as Guatemala give her actions a
charged significance that goes beyond the
feminist performance works produced in Europe
and the United States thirty or forty years ago.
Here, the artist is not describing an abstract
problem or expressing her nonconformity with a
male-dominated society. After thirty-six years
of civil war, with a legacy of 260,000
disappeared victims, the battle continues in
Guatemala, where women are silenced, abducted,
tortured, and murdered without their cases ever
being solved and with no justice done.
Authorities even attempt to justify the victims’
violent deaths, suggesting that they were
prostitutes, criminals, or mareras (gang
members.) At least 547 women were murdered
between January and October of 2005, and the
government remains passive in the face of a
phenomenon that in the past six years has taken
the lives of over 2000 women.
When
Regina Galindo bites her nails obsessively until
she draws blood (in Autocanibalismo,
2002) or locks herself inside a room in order to
hit herself as many times as the number of women
murdered in her country (in Golpes, 2005) or has
herself taken to the municipal landfill inside a
plastic bag (in No perdemos nada con
nacer, 2000), she uses the space afforded
her by art to reclaim the viewer’s attention and
remind us, repeatedly, of what takes place in
the real world, the world that exists outside
museums, galleries, and opening-night cocktail
parties.
In Boda Galindo-Herrera
(2004), the artist uses the image of the bride,
the quintessential image manufactured for women.
She hired the services of a wedding photo studio
and portrays herself wearing a white dress for a
nonexistent wedding. Her face displays a hopeful
smile as she poses for the camera, holding a
bouquet of flowers; save for a large
candelabrum, she appears alone. In Recorte
por la línea (2005), a work created in
collaboration with Dr. Billy Spence for the
first Body Art Festival in Caracas, Venezuela,
the artist laid naked before the plastic
surgeon, who used markers of different colors to
delineate the parts of her body that would
require surgical modification in order to
achieve a perfect figure. In front of the public
and their cameras, Galindo subjected herself to
an exhibition of her “defects.”
In 2000,
several artists were invited to produce works
based on what it means to live in Guatemala. In
Valium 10 ml, remembering Miguel Angel
Asturias’s dictum that “In this country one can
only live well drunk or unconscious,” Galindo
injected herself with ten milliliters of Valium
and passed out. Her inert state described not
only the attitude of the authorities in the face
of violence and corruption but of society in
general. Women, men, and children are brutally
murdered in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez, but
also in El Salvador, Peru, and probably every
other Latin American country, while the First
World blindly and silently witnesses these
facts.
The Milan Prometeogallery also
exhibited other well-known works by Galindo, the
winner of the Golden Lion for young artists at
the last Venice Biennale. The controversial
Himenoplastia (2004) documented the
surgical reconstruction of the artist’s hymen.
¿Quién puede olvidar las huellas? (2003)
showed Galindo walking through the streets of
downtown Guatemala City, wetting her feet in a
blood-filled bucket, and leaving a path of
footprints from the Constitutional Court
building to the Presidential Palace, where she
was welcomed by a police battalion. The Court
had just validated former dictator Efraín Ríos
Montt, the country’s foremost author of
genocide, as a presidential
candidate.
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