KEY POINTS:
For her art, Regina José Galindo has curled into a clear rubbish bag and been taken to the city dump. She's spent a month dressed as a maid in her home country, Guatemala, where maids are held beneath contempt. She's carved the Spanish word for "bitch" into her
leg in reference to gang rapes and has endured a back-street hymen reconstruction, an operation popular with brides-to-be wanting to feign virginity - perhaps the most excruciating of her recordings to watch.
Galindo's work, on display in the 3rd Auckland Triennial, New Zealand's biggest global contemporary art show which opened last Friday, is searingly confrontational and intimately political. Her body is her canvas and her protest banner.
But, the 32-year-old insists her intention is not to shock. "I just try to maintain a critical position facing events - to form questions for myself and for others," she told the Herald on Sunday.
The most famous exponent of an in-your-face Guatemalan public performance movement, Galindo turned heads at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she won Golden Lion for best emerging artist.
Her entry included the hymenoplasty footage and 279 Blows, a video of her whipping herself once for every woman murdered in Guatemala in the first few months of 2005. Also featured was one of the works we'll get to see: the haunting Who can erase the traces?, in which Galindo silently walks the streets of Guatemala City, dipping her bare feet in a basin of human blood every few paces.
The bloody footprints recall those killed in massacres of the early 1980s under the military regime of General Efrain Rios Montt, who was allowed to stand (unsuccessfully) for president in 2003 and is, incredibly, running for Congress this year.
Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended in 1996, but violence, corruption and deep-rooted inequalities are still part of daily life.
Galindo says Guatemalans are disillusioned and enervated by indifference and inaction. In one work, she injected herself repeatedly with valium to make the point.
One day she came across a box containing a woman's broken legs on the road - a factor in her decision to leave the country for a spell.
But she says what's depicted in her art is universal.
"Violence and pain have accompanied human beings all through their existence. It is part of who we are... We can be aware of cruelty, but we cannot make it disappear, since with it goodness would also disappear.
"All of this should be in balance, but there are eras in which the negative has more weight, becomes more powerful, we become blind, unfeeling, unconscious."
She waves away the pain she puts herself through for her art.
"Each performance is a small act of resistance facing this or that situation. We're not dealing with sacrificial acts or gratuitous acts of pain. The performance is the use of the body, a study of it." Does she worry she might inadvertently eroticise or romanticise self-harm? "I do not have that moral concern or guilt, I am perhaps a reflection of what you are saying, maybe I am a person with low self-esteem."
From her work you might imagine her to be a grim character, eaten up by anger and despair. But she says analysing the dark side is only "a very small facet" of her life. "Half my life, or more than half of it, I live in peace, with my family, alone, in the Dominican Sea, or a mountain in Guatemala." She works as a publicist and is expecting a baby this month and as a result she will not be in Auckland.
Despite the power of her work, she doesn't believe art can save the world. "That would be too romantic and pretentious... Art at best can awaken concern, make us question."
Top Turbulence
The 3rd Auckland Triennial: Turbulence opened March 9.
Highlights include:
Isaac Julien (UK)
Film inspired by first black person to reach the North Pole.
Phil Collins (UK)
Seven-hour video shows Palestinian teens dancing to pop music.
Lucia Madriz (Costa Rica)
Huge pirate flag is made from beans, corn and rice - staples of Central America which are being overrun by GM grains.
Carlos Capelan (Uruguay/Sweden)
Capelan has painted a huge piece in Auckland and will talk about being a Uruguayan in Sweden.
The Long March Project
A competition to design a Chinatown on the waterfront.
Willie Doherty (Northern Ireland)
Video depicts living in a divided society.
Alexandros Georgiou (Greece)
Georgiou travels from Varanasi to Auckland, making art on the way.
The Atlas Group/Walid Raad (Lebanon, USA)
Performance with video provides a take on life in Lebanon.
Lida Abdul (Afghanistan)
Abdul's video depicts horsemen trying to tear down war-torn ruins.
Alfredo Jaar (Chile/USA)
Haunting film shot in Angola.
