Regina José Galindo en el MNAC de Rumania
The National Museum of Contemporary Art ( MNAC), of Bucarest presents the exhibition "Urgent Issues" with a selection of performances of Regina José Galindo done in the past decade, curated by Ruxandra Balaci.
As the catalog from Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani states, 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-humanitarian side of certain politics and 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.
According to the MNAC, 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”.
