SOFACQ Gallery
Galindo Regina José - Limpieza Social
2006 - Lampdaprint on forex - 155 x 104 cm

Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, 1974) is a Guatemalan artist who is known for her body art and performances. She was born in Guatemala City during the Guatemalan Civil War. Her themes are violence, injustice and oppression against women in particular. Own meat Her first performances were in 1999 in Guatemala with which she gained international fame. She hung herself in a crucifix pose and projected newspaper articles about woman abuse on her naked body. She dumped herself in a garbage bag at the municipal rubbish dump in 2005 and carved the word perra (bitch) into her flesh. In her work Himenoplastia, the video shows how her hymen was surgically repaired, an operation many women in the world are undergoing for fear of rejection and humiliation. For this she received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale in 2005. She had to sell this award to be able to pay for her plane ticket home. The aftermath of the civil war is also a theme in Galindo's work. During the performance ¿Quién Puede Borrar las Huellas? (Who can cover the tracks?), Conducted in 2003, she walked from Congress to the National Palace in Guatemala. She dipped her feet in human blood to leave a mark. With this little original action, she protested the candidacy for the presidency of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. She also had herself sprayed by a water cannon under the title Social Cleansing. Appear More recent work seems to indicate that Galindo no longer only uses her own body as a starting point for her work. In 2007 she made a video triptych XX. Here she showed the funeral of dozens of unidentified bodies of men, women and children who disappeared into the ground in plastic bags. The artist placed a white gravestone with the inscription "Guatemala 2007" and a double X in front of the unnamed dead. In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem exhibited her work from the past 10 years. Three years later, in 2011, she was once again in the spotlight in the Netherlands with an award in one of the Prince Claus Awards.