Upon walking into the VAC, I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve heard about Regina José Galindo’s work for the past few weeks, but every time someone tries to describe her creations, they can’t find the right words. What I gathered from these descriptions was just a fraction of the reality: “performance artist,” “her own body,” “moving,” “disturbing,” “powerful.” The hour and a half I spent at the exhibit proved that each of these descriptors do, in fact, apply to her, but Galindo is an artist whose work resists description; her art is to be experienced rather than seen.
Born in Guatemala City in 1974, Galindo creates highly politicized work to express her criticisms of Guatemala’s history of an oppressive government and oppression towards women. In many of her pieces, the artist herself is nude in various stages of distress. While she is a performance artist, her work is documented through film and photography. In what is one of her most famous pieces, ¿Quién Puede Borrar las Huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?), Galindo carries a basin of human blood and steps into the basin to leave bloody footprints from the Congress of Guatemala building to the National Palace as a form of protest. Perhaps what is so deeply moving in Galindo’s work is that her primary medium is not material but rather the human body.
In another series of photographs, Galindo carves the word “perra” (a derogatory word for women in Spanish) into her own thigh. It was fascinating to see how in this piece, and indeed many others, Galindo experiments with the corporality of the female body. In her artwork, Galindo willingly undergoes scenes of torture, including a video segment where an unseen figure sprays her naked body continuously with a fire hose while she is backed into a corner. In all of her pieces, Galindo invokes a sympathetic response in the viewer, as though the audio-visual qualities of her work pull us into her pieces so that we can experience her art. Indeed, Galindo brings us out of ourselves for a moment and into her world of Guatemala City, one of the most dangerous places in the world, so that we can see the beauty and the terror of her everyday life.