Guatemalan artist Regina Jos\u00e9 Galindo\u2019s work is centred on the immutable presence of the body before the adversities it must face. Marked by the civil war that tore her country apart between 1960 and 1996, Galindo\u2019s work decries violence, particularly violence against women, and sheds light on the suffering that issues from it. Over 200,000 people were assassinated, tens of thousands disappeared, and over a million were displaced during the thirty-six-year armed conflict. As if to make up for the countless erased or missing bodies, the body\u200a\u2014\u200aoften the artist\u2019s own\u200a\u2014\u200abecomes a commemorative monument to the lost, an instrument of visibility that enables us to interrogate the injustice and to beget a visceral empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many of her performances, Galindo strives to lend visibility to the victims of rape and femicide, both in Guatemala and in the countries that she visits, through the recurring motif of the veiled figure, hidden under a sheet. Between corporeality and abstraction, the ghostly aesthetic suggests a state of absence inhabited by pain. For the Jard\u00edn de Flores<\/em> project (2021), she invited twenty-five trans women to stand under coloured sheets in a Guatemalan city park, like flowers emerging from the soil, to assert their existence and condemn the violence suffered by 2SLGBTQIA+ communities in Latin America. Similarly, the Aparici\u00f3n<\/em> series (2021\u200a\u2014\u200a22) and the performances Nuestra mayor venganza es estar vivas<\/em> (2021), El canto se hizo grito<\/em> (2021), and Monumento a las desaparecidas<\/em> (2020) present enshrouded bodies, living sculptures that visually register the constant murders of women within a reality embedded in the dynamics of iniquity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Galindo provokes a spark, one that has the potentiality of a blaze lighting up the darkest corners of humanity. \u201cI believe,\u201d she says, \u201cin the incendiary quality of art. I believe in the hand\u2019s innate ability to light a match.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n