Art Basel Miami Beach OVR

Prometeo gallery has always distinguished itself as a catalyst of social and political instances of multimedia visual artists.

This year the protagonists are two women, active for the defense of basic civil rights in two "suburbs" of the world: the Guatemalan Regina José Galindo and the Kurdish Zehra Dogan. Zehra and Regina come from different generations and places, Guatemala and Turkey, they express themselves through different means, such as painting, photography and performance video, but they are associated in the project of Prometeo Gallery as opponents of all forms of violence, sometimes even legitimized by the authorities and religious interference.

The works presented at ABMB are monuments to women subjugated to the point of being killed by power or, perhaps even more tragically, by their partners in the home.

So for example Zehra, a 31-year-old Kurdish artist, almost three of whom spent in prison in Turkey for a painting, traces in color and gold leaf on a Persian carpet the silhouette of two figures that convey a sense of "Unity" (the title of the work is Unity) even though in a country disintegrated like Kurdistan.

A feminicide, the 34th from January 1 to date in Spain, has instead inspired the work of Regina José Galindo Detrás de la Ventana (2020). A Guatemalan woman (and therefore Galindo's compatriot), Nancy Paola, was killed and dismembered by her companion in a very reassuring home. Hence the title chosen by the artist Galindo: Behind the window, to be understood as that of his own home. This is why the 34 immobile women in front of the cathedral of Salamanca, portrayed by Galindo in a performance that the pandemic has made remote, have their bodies covered with colored curtains, which make them unique and somehow celebrate them, like spirits to whom to dedicate a performative monument in the patio of a place of prayer.

So while Galindo establishes a living monument to commemorate the sacrifice of anonymous and otherwise forgotten women as marginal "scraps", collateral damage of a violent society like Guatemalan, Doğan not only celebrates women "martyrs" of her Kurdish people, but ennobles female organic materials perceived as waste, i.e. menstrual blood and urine, using them for her Red Army in my Pants (2020) and Reach (2020) paintings.