Art Review - How Regina José Galindo Unearths the Colonising Gaze

It’s hard not to be hyper-aware of where one stands when encountering Regina José Galindo’s videowork, Tierra (2013). In it, the artist stands naked in a field while an excavator razes the land around her, ultimately leaving her on an island of grass surrounded by a six-foot trench. At the time of the performance, the former president of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt, was standing trial for crimes against humanity that included genocidal sexual violence against Maya Ixil people. I first learned about Tierra from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico’s (MAC ; 2021) show called Turned Into Sterile Land: it joined work by artists such as Ana Mendieta and las Nietas de Nonó to pay close attention to how, throughout histories of conquest and imperialism, land and women have suffered parallel forms of exploitation. Since, the colonising gaze formed categories like ‘land’ and ‘gender’ to identify them as abusable resources. Land becomes valuable for its ability to reproduce resources and women are seen as mere incubators for more colonial subjects; land becomes gendered and feminised bodies are treated like dirt.

 

 

To a Puerto Rican audience at MAC, this relationship between land and gender recalled a familiar history of ‘population control’, wherein the US government targeted women of child-bearing age for coerced or forced sterilisation as a way of tightening its colonial grip on the islands, especially in the sixties and seventies. Now at MoMA PS1, Tierra is on view for the first time since entering MoMA’s collection in 2020. The video is projected across a two-story wall and the artist’s naked body becomes a giant before the visitors circulating the room. Galindo is a slight figure, a fact of proportion she uses to her advantage in her performances. When the Guggenheim Museum exhibited the work in 2014, it noted the ‘stark contrast between the machine’s huge, armored bulk and the artist’s vulnerable body’. In her catalogue essay for the Puerto Rican exhibition, by Emilia Quiñones Otal describes how Galindo’s body, ‘a feminized and (and outside of Guatemala) radicalized body’ not only ‘problematizes the holocaust in Guatemala, but also questions the sexual and reproductive attacks that were carried out against the indigenous people of the region.’ When Galindo discussed Tierra in 2021 she described how “around me there is nothing more than chaos and theft but I remain on my feet, ready to fight, ready to defend the land that roots me”.

 

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