Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan artist of the generation that was creative during the years of acute violence in the country and developed during a time that saw the country begin to open up politically and modernize, which followed the period of civil war (1960-1996).

The artistic path of Regina José Galindo began with poetry and her transition into the performative arena occured quite naturally. She was spurred on by the influence of other writers and visual artists, and in particular by the need to express herself. Her artistic practice was influenced by her awareness of the strong poetic charge of the body, which she still uses "to depict" words today. Her departure from poetry to performance is not an isolated case, given that many artists in the field of literature have used visual art, music and performance to identify the possibilities of poetry beyond poetry. Performance as a catalyst in communicating the message conveyed with the materialization of the subject, object and action, gives rise to the formal and functional links between the two mediums, thus enhancing the  means of searching for a different sort of reception.

The artist presented herself as a performer for the first time in February 1999 in the group exhibition Sin pelos en la lengua (Not Mincing Words) with the piece El dolor en un pañuelo (The Pain in a Handkerchief), in which she disclosed the violence and abuse against women in Guatemala. Regina José Galindo exposes the body, sexuality, feminism and urbanity in her work, which she further elaborates by dealing with the issues of globalization, capitalism and biopolitics.

The exhibition entitled The Anatomy Lesson in the Jakopič gallery, curated by Yasmín Martín Vodopivec, presenta an overview of the artist’s work, within which, despite the expanding subject areas and altered mechanisms, the poetic component remains constant. The Anatomy Lesson raises questions of allocation of gender, cultural and social identities. Regina José Galindo operates in a constant oscillation between the two poles – between poetic language and physical action, individuality and collectivity, between the local and the global. In this way, she highlights the diversification of identities that speak of existential conflict through the metaphorization of historicity.

The performances of Regina José Galindo function as a meticulous process of social diagnosing, an incessant posing of questions, through which the artist invites us to a common experience of opening up new spaces – spaces for change. The flexibility of the circulation of knowledge, which Galindo’s works establish repeatedly, erases the classical scheme of production and reception, extending an invitation to cross one’s own borders, calling for a transformation of one’s field of experience.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Regina José Galindo (1974) is a Guatemalan performance artist that has been creating her visual narrative through the medium of the body since 1999. Galindo has exhibited four times at the Venice Biennale, in 2005 receiving the Golden Lion for young artists under thirty. In 2011, she also received the Grand Prix at the 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana as well as the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands.
She has also participated in the XI International Biennial of Cuenca, the Sharjah Biennial, the Pontevedra Biennial 2010, the 17th Biennale of Sydney, the II Moscow Biennale, the First Auckland Triennial, the second international exhibition Venice-Istanbul organized by The Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, the First Canary Islands Biennial of Art and Architecture, the IV Bienal de Valencia, the Third Biennial of Albania, the Prague Biennale 2, and the Third Biennial of Lima.
Her works can be found in numerous collections such as the Pompidou Centre, the University of Essex, Princeton University, MEIAC – Extremadura and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art, Fondazione Teseco, Fondazione Galleria Civica, MMKA – Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary, the Counseling of Murcia, Art Foundation Mallorca, Rivoli Museum of Torino, the Daros Foundation, the Blanton Museum of Art, La Gaia Collection, the UBS Art Collection, the Miami Art Museum, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of Costa Rica.
In 1998, she received an award from the Myrna Mack Foundation for her poetry. Her poems have been published in several anthologies and magazines. In 1996, the Coloquia Foundation published her book entitled Personal e Intransmisible.

The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts is one of the oldest biennials in the world. Its emergence in 1955 pinpointed Ljubljana and the visual art of Slovenia on the world map. The Biennial is highly esteemed by international measure and is recognized as a high-quality event, whereas Slovene art has in turn become well-known outside Slovenia’s borders because of the Biennial. It is the printmakers that most widely represent Slovene art in the museums of the world, something which the Biennial contributed to, as well as inviting artists to major international exhibitions.