On view through Oct. 25, at Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries is the ambitious work of Regina José Galindo. “Bearing Witness” is a survey exhibit of more than 20 performance pieces spanning 15 years.
Curated by Gallery Director and Curator Lia Newman, the 41-year-old internationally acclaimed Guatemalan artists’ creative work includes video, sculpture and photos of her performances.
“Bearing Witness” is a challenging exhibition for the everyday viewer. In her performances, she uses her unclothed body, self-mutilation, self-imprisonment and other strategies to objectify the exploitation of the powerless and to demonstrate a determined resistance against a culture of violence and abuse in Guatemala and in the at-large world.
She addresses global concerns that, for her, begin in her Guatemala City home town. Considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world in 2010, the artist is no stranger to violence, corruption, trafficking of all kinds, exploitation and abuse of women, among other crimes.
There are many ways we might argue with the artist’s tactics.
There is, however, no question that this artist understands the human condition and she thoughtfully works to strip away our own contrivances and cosmetic conceits to provoke us to “feel” again and to engage in civil world-making.
Galindo’s performances and intense social engagement tactics have earlier antecedents. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, among others, American performance artist Chris Burden explored the nature of suffering by having a friend shoot him in the arm with a 22-caliber rifle. In “Shoot,” the artist stripped away the artifice of television culture to instead provide authentic audience engagement with a violent act.
Galindo similarly strives to reconnect our capacity for empathy and engagement in a world that is in need of civility and whose citizens have often grown immune to inhuman acts that are tolerated through inaction.
The artist’s performances memorialize the dead, the disavowed, the abused. In the 2008 performance “Extensión/Extension,” for example, the artist made hair extensions from unidentified female murder victims and she and other women wore them to remember lives lived and silenced.
“Alud/Avalanche” of 2011 awakened observer empathy during a mock tragedy as onlookers symbolically took turns gently cleaning the artist-as-victim’s mud-soaked body with cloths and water.
Regina José Galindo’s life work is a call to each of us to be our best selves. Her performances cut deeply into the psyche of our humanity, our moral beliefs and sense of civility. She reminds us that memory is essential to social progress as much as is our involvement and that investing ourselves in equitable living circumstances for all is perhaps our highest human calling.
Later in the exhibit’s run at the College, the Gallery will premier the artist’s newest work, “A Latino Near You,” a piece commissioned by the College. According to Galindo, “It’s about thousands of North Americans’ paranoia about Latin Americans living in their land. It’s about the latest events in which personalities, politicians and civilians speak shamelessly about their childish racism towards those they consider different, ‘others’ ”
This story was produced as part of the Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance.
Read the original article from the Charlotte Obersver here.