Regina José Galindo

Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1974

            The work of Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo has developed a singular performative language—one capable of hybridizing the local history of her country, where she lives and works, with her personal biography and global-scale phenomena that reveal how structural, anonymous violence operates upon the body. Trained in the art of poetic writing, a practice she continues to this day, her entry into the world of contemporary art came through performative intervention. Her powerful techniques range from raw and visceral performances to evocative paintings, often laying bare the human condition and compelling viewers to confront unfiltered, harsh realities. Her art unearths deep emotions of discomfort, urgency, and awareness, fostering an intimate engagement with social issues.

In the immediate context following the end of the Guatemalan civil war, Galindo undertook a brave and unsettling body of work that furiously denounced injustice and inequality. In ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (2005), one of her first widely recognized pieces, the artist walked barefoot for nearly an hour between two seats of power in Guatemala City, leaving a trail of human blood footprints in memory of the more than 200,000 victims of the armed conflict in her country. Yet her interventions are not solely rooted in the national past; her body also carries the contemporary history of migrant identities and the harrowing path shaped by increasingly repressive and exclusionary immigration policies. In 2008, she created America’s Family Prison, presented in San Antonio, Texas. The artist documented a full day of confinement, alongside her family, inside a white, empty cube constructed by a U.S. private corporation that mass-produces detention cells for undocumented immigrants.

            Galindo has also addressed the issue of extractivist economies in several of her later works. In Looting/Saqueo (2010) and Tierra (2013), she exposes the violence of transnational production systems, where acts of extraction—whether by a dentist removing gold from her mouth or a massive excavator enclosing and isolating her in the middle of the Guatemalan countryside—encode the deadly force of contemporary exploitation.

            Galindo has received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Best Young Artist at the 51st Venice Biennale and the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands. She has participated in the Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, the Cuenca International Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale, and many others around the world. Her work is included in major contemporary art collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Tate in London, and the Guggenheim Collection, among others.