REGINA JOSE GALINDO / THE ANATOMY LESSON
Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan artist of the generation that was creative during the years of acute violence in the country and developed during a time that saw the country begin to open up politically and modernize, which followed the period of civil war (1960-1996).The artist presented herself as a performer for the first time in February 1999 in the group exhibition Sin pelos en la lengua (Not Mincing Words) with the piece El dolor en un pañuelo (The Pain in a Handkerchief), in which she disclosed the violence and abuse against women in Guatemala. Regina José Galindo exposes the body, sexuality, feminism and urbanity in her work, which she further elaborates by dealing with the issues of globalization, capitalism and biopolitics.
The exhibition entitled The Anatomy Lesson in the Jakopič gallery, curated by Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, presents an overview of the artist's work, within which, despite the expanding subject areas and altered mechanisms, the poetic component remains constant. The Anatomy Lesson raises questions of allocation of gender, cultural and social identities. Regina José Galindo operates in a constant oscillation between the two poles -- between poetic language and physical action, individuality and collectivity, between the local and the global. In this way, she highlights the diversification of identities that speak of existential conflict through the metaphorization of historicity.
The artistic path of Regina José Galindo began with poetry and her transition into the performative arena occured quite naturally. She was spurred on by the influence of other writers and visual artists, and in particular by the need to express herself. Her artistic practice was influenced by her awareness of the strong poetic charge of the body, which she still uses "to depict" words today. Her departure from poetry to performance is not an isolated case, given that many artists in the field of literature have used visual art, music and performance to identify the possibilities of poetry beyond poetry. Performance as a catalyst in communicating the message conveyed with the materialization of the subject, object and action, gives rise to the formal and functional links between the two mediums, thus enhancing the means of searching for a different sort of reception.
The performances of Regina José Galindo function as a meticulous process of social diagnosing, an incessant posing of questions, through which the artist invites us to a common experience of opening up new spaces -- spaces for change. The flexibility of the circulation of knowledge, which Galindo's works establish repeatedly, erases the classical scheme of production and reception, extending an invitation to cross one's own borders, calling for a transformation of one's field of experience.
