Regina José Galindo
Urgent Issues
10 February – 20 April 2010
Curator: Ruxandra Balaci
MNAC / The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Str. Izvor 2-4, E4, Bucharest (RO), 050563
tel: +40 21 318 91 37 / fax: +40 21 318 91 38
Regina José Galindo’s performances show the bitterness of individual experiences in oppressive political regimes and in social contexts of flagrant injustice: a reflection over limit situation of the human condition, over major ruptures and traumas, that are deeply hurting the private and the intimate, unveiling the anti-humanist side of politics and the anti-humanist side of society.
Involving performance and the body as main devices in her artistic process, through a kind of re-enactment, the artist substitutes herself to the weak and the humble, to the tortured and to the oppressed re-staging limit situation of body and mind. Her own delicate, feminine body is mistreated – in a kind of unselfish exposure to various traumas inflicted on all other human beings. She is thus recalling the line of activist gender oeuvres with references to ancestral shamanic myths and exorcising gestures such as of Ana Mendieta, Sigalit Landau, rituals of resistance in Tania Bruguera’s work, or Teresa Margolles’ impressive installations over death and the excluded of society.
Borderline situations, in-between life and death, generated by injustice and injuries (both physical and moral) or sacrifices, focusing on fear and anguish and their consequences, have as result dramatic and radical works, profoundly uncomfortable and ethically embarrassing for a bourgeois public.
Providing insightful thoughts about an offensive reality that makes fuzzy the border between art and life, artists such as Regina José Galindo are confirming once more the moral duty of the intellectual to be a lucid witness of the society in which he/she lives, to understand and explain the context even in a most shocking manner and sometimes to institute that subtle but efficient “inland dissidence” Chomsky was speaking about.
Urgent Issues presents a selection of works created between 2000 and 2009 and will be followed by a catalogue issued by Prometeogallery
Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, 1974) took part in the Venice Biennale in 2001, 2005 and 2009. In 2005 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Young Artist. Her works are now in several public and private collections and have been exhibited in many venues, including PS1 New York, Le Plateau Paris, CIFO Miami, Smak Ghent, Tirana Biennale, Museo de Arte Moderna de Guatemala, TEOR/ética Costa Rica.
Ruxandra Balaci is a curator and Founder Artistic Director of MNAC Bucharest
MNAC partners: BRD Groupe Societe Generale, Novotel
Sponsors: Murfatlar
Media partners: Igloo, Arhitectura, 24 Fun, Rfi Romania, feeder.ro, Cocor MediaChannel
