All tagged Alberta Pane Gallery

An Exhibition in Paris Confronts the Brutalization of Women

Galindo’s videos and photographs document performances in which she positioned herself in scenes of staged precarity and abuse as a way of representing violence against women in her native country. The works on display range from somewhat absurd images – La Sombra (The Shadow, 2017), for instance, in which the subject runs towards the camera as a tank rolls behind her – to the less graphic but more disturbing video-performance La Verdad (The Truth, 2013). In this piece, Galindo reads aloud first-hand accounts of rape and genocide during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War. La Verdad is punctuated by the intervention of a dentist, who periodically injects local anaesthetic into her mouth, causing her speech to slur. It is the most potent work in the show for the way that it stages and dramatizes a history of physical and sexual violence and for its allusion to ongoing forms of government censorship, obfuscation and forgetting. In works such as a still from the video of the performance Piel (Skin, 2001), the artist utilizes her naked body as a conduit for articulating the reification of women. However, La Verdad feels more impactful because it is the only piece in the exhibition where the brutalized women speak. Even if the viewer cannot see their faces nor knows their names, Galindo’s ventriloquizing of her own voice to bear witness for these women’s suffering offers them agency and presence in a way that the other works do not.