Regina Jos� Galindo

Since 1999, the Guatemalan performance artist Regina Jos� Galindo (born 1974) has drawn attention to her native country's oppression of women and the poor by activating her body as a site for collective inscription. Several of her performances are extreme exercises in the deprivation of dignity: she has been publicly stunned with an electroshock gun and �cleansed� with a power hose; she once commissioned a plastic surgeon to locate the imperfections on her naked body in public with a marker. In Guatemala, these actions are not so easily assigned to the symbolic realm: in a 2005 interview Galindo said, �As Guatemalans, we know how to decipher any image of pain, because we have seen it all up close.� This volume surveys all of Regina Jos� Galindo's works in performance and video from 2006 to 2010.