La Galería Rebelde is pleased to present the first retrospective exhibition of Guatemalan artist María Adela Díaz (1973), a pioneer of performance art in the country, and her first solo exhibition in Guatemala. The exhibition covers her 25-year career, including her first performances in public spaces in Guatemala in 1999 to her latest installation works.   

María Adela Díaz began her performance work in the late 1990s, just after the signing of the Peace Accords in Guatemala in 1996, which ended a 36-year war in the country. Díaz, along with other female artists such as Regina José Galindo and Sandra Monterroso, began to use the body as a means to point to the atrocities of war, the state corruption, and the role of the female body as a victim of machismo and discrimination. Previously in Guatemala, art was dominated by traditional and academic values in painting and sculpture. Political discourses were represented pictorially with abstract and figurative intentions, and it was not until the late 1990s that a break occurred between modernity and contemporaneity to accommodate new media, names, and discourses such as performance art.

SHE’S MAD is both an acronym for the artist’s initials and a title that evokes the rawness of her work. Her performances disruptively denounce the violence experienced by women and migrant bodies, from the rage and anger of her powerlessness. Her denunciations are screams and her images are strong poetic landscapes in which every detail is symbolic in the action.

María Adela Díaz made her first performance in 1999. In 2001 she emigrated to the United States illegally and since then, her work speaks about what it means to be a migrant woman in the contemporary world. Díaz uses her body as a starting point, through performances, installations, videos, collages and objects, to explore the complex essence and sublimity of being a woman in different cultural societies.

The exhibition displays her performances documented in video and photography, as well as a series of installations that recreate the objects used in the oldest actions and of which only negatives and urban legends remain. Such as the memory of her first performance in which from the depths of a sewer she writes poems that the public on the surface can read or the collective action of twenty uniformed women who disrupted an event at the Teatro al Aire Libre in Guatemala.

These are works that, through captivating images, denounce the different injustices that women experience in the world. Also as a Latinx artist, Díaz's artwork questions social justice in terms of gender, inequalities, migrations, and white supremacy, among others. Díaz explores the very deep emotions of humanity in her work, focusing on social and political issues that begin in Guatemala City, where she experienced war and extreme violence, but are part of the contemporary conditions of the world.

SHE’S MAD will be on view at La Galería Rebelde in Guatemala City from September to October 2024, marking the artist’s return to the Guatemalan art scene and reclaiming the place her work holds in history. This will be the first time her work is shown in a solo retrospective exhibition as most of her performances in Guatemala have not been exhibited again since the 2000s. This is an opportunity to catapult her work as one of the pioneers of performance and feminist art in a country where bodies continue to disappear while women continue to loudly demand rights for women’s bodies.
-Josseline Pinto, Curator

Photography: José Oquendo