Regina José Galindo’s performances are often shocking and degrading. Sometimes naked, she is tasered, hit, bloodied, anesthetized, urinated on, or left for dead. “Bearing Witness,” at North Carolina’s David son College last fall, was Galindo’s first solo show in the United States. Curator Lia Newman gathered an intense selection featuring video and photographic documentation of past performances, performance artifacts and props, and a new work commissioned and produced by the college. Although the form of Galindo’s work is indebted to ’70s performance art, its content has little relation to art historical tradition; instead, it raises an immediate, intensely personal expression of alarm. Much of Galindo’s work is rooted in the recent history of Guatemala, going back to the brief, genocidal rule of Efraín Ríos Montt in the early 1980s and its long, vile aftermath. Under Montt and his head of military intelligence, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, thousands of Mayans were killed or displaced. Neither Montt nor Sanchez has ever been held fully accountable, and indigenous people in Guatemala continue to be exploited. …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
