Regina Galindo does things to herself, or more specifically to her body, that hurt. She ties herself up, carves epithets into her skin with a knife, injects sedatives into her veins. She gets hosed down, dumped naked in a trash heap, dragged by her hair, forcibly dunked in water, and confined to a prison cell. She invites people to cut hair off, draw her blood and take her clothes –- in exchange for money.
These masochistic gestures resemble well-known body art performances from the 1970s, when many artists in Europe and America manipulated their own flesh as sculptural material to test their mental and physical limits. Like those artists, Galindo gives herself over to the gaze of others, allowing herself to be controlled by them. And like those artists, she keeps her gestures minimal, repetitive and devoid of spoken language. Interestingly, she turned to performance without formal art training, after a brief foray into poetry. Her visceral gestures form potent poetic metaphors.
Galindo distinguishes herself from the body artists of the 70s by refusing to suppress the narrative dimension of her actions or the social contexts from which they emerge. History is thus allowed to speak and Galindo’s silent movements are in dialogue with it. Some of her works refer directly to the history of political violence in her native country of Guatemala, but many are expressive of the widespread economic polarities and fractured political orders that pervade the Global South. Her work takes us into the dark side of many cities where the scenes of subjection that she draws on are routine and rarely acknowledged. - Coco Fusco (Link to article)

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