'Regina José Galindo. We decolonize the world' at the La Panera Art Center

The La Panera Art Center presents the exhibition Regina José Galindo. We decolonize the world, curated by Semiramis González, which can be visited from June 15 to September 29, 2024.

The extensive work of Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, 1974) has been analyzed from multiple exhibitions that have allowed us to delve deeper into her artistic work spanning several decades. With a deeply committed body of work, in which corporeality and its viscerality are taken to the limit, Galindo has traversed concepts linked to violence, and has made performance the ideal medium to denounce them.

We decolonize the world traces a conceptual journey through Galindo's work with a decolonial look at various works, stating from a country that experienced colonization. With works from the beginning of the 21st century and even a specific performance designed for this exhibition, Bitter Fruit (which denounces the vulnerable situation of temporary people who pick fruit in Lleida, mostly migrants), Descolonize the world questions how the official account of the West, and specifically from Europe and the United States, has been built on the foundations of the exploitation of the so-called "countries of the Global South".

The images here are political. They are evidence of colonialism. As the Bolivian sociologist and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argues, in colonial construction "words do not designate, but cover up. [...] The words became a fictional register, plagued by euphemisms that guard reality instead of designating it». Thus, it is the images and the bodies that are able to reveal the double discursive meanings: "From a historical perspective, the images have allowed me to discover meanings not censored by the official language." This is something that the work of Regina José Galindo has allowed to reveal in its different actions.