Regina José Galindo

Regina José Galindo (born August 27, 1974, in Guatemala City) is a Guatemalan artist who specializes in performance art. She is currently one of the main artists working in this medium in Latin America, and is also a poet. Her work is characterized by her explicit political and critical content, using her body as a tool for confrontation and social transformation. She received the Golden Lion as best young artists in the Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Prince Clause Prize in 2011.

Biography 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, and also by a deeply ingrained social inequality resulting from colonialism pair with government instability. " 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.

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.

"279 Golpes" (279 Blows) is another of her performances from 2005 in which she is enclosed in a cubicle and inflicts a blow on her own body for each murdered woman in Guatemala from January 1st to the 9th of that year.

She frequently collaborates with other art performers, including compatriot Aníbal López.

List of solo exhibitions + Date(s) Exhibition title Location Work(s) exhibited Curator (if known)