A Guatemalan artists uses her body as a human canvas to portray suffering.

“I LIVE in a violent country, and that is where my violent art comes from,” says Regina José Galindo.

Fervent and frightening, aggressive, painful, courageous, determined, and incredibly powerful; you won’t enjoy The Body of Others, and I hope you won’t relate to it. But I recommend you go to see it, because you won’t be able to avoid being moved by it.

Guatemalan born artist Regina José Galindo has lived through 36 years of civil war that claimed over 200,000 lives.

The Body of Others is not a lighthearted exhibition. But it’s insightful, reflective, straightforward, and brutally brilliant.

In conversation with the exhibition’s curator, the artist commented: “To be a woman in Guatemala is difficult; to be Guatemalan is even more difficult … to be an artist in Guatemala is like ploughing in the sand!”

Some may put the world to rights over a ‘couple’ in their local; José Galindo uses her body to highlight the existence of social and political injustices, highlights of which, are presented in this, José Galindo’s first UK exhibition.

Documenting her actions (or performances) as films or photography, she makes no attempt to offer a solution to her issue, a reflection, perhaps of the looming danger that goes hand-in-hand with freedom of speech in her homeland.

Bringing international attention to a ‘silent’ war, Quien puede borrar las huellas? (Who can erase the traces?), 2003 also brought José Galindo international acclaim in 2005, when she won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale.

The work, is a response to General Rios Montt’s 2003 presidential campaign, and commemorates the victims of the former dictator’s violent regime.

The work documents the artist’s walk from Guatemala City’s Constitutional Court to the National Palace. Barefoot and dressed in black, José Galindo carries a bowl of blood, above, that, like a soldier in a trance, she uniformly steps in and out of, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her.

Through the shock, and discomfort of facing tombstones, torture, rape and death, there remains a very quiet, considered, rhythmic delicacy to the work presented in The Body of Others.

This is encapsulated perhaps most poignantly in Lo voy a gritar al viento (I’ll shout it to the wind), 1999. This video lasts three minutes 45 seconds, in which the artist hangs, suspended like a liberated spectre, high above the Guatemalan streetscape, reciting poetry, tossing the poem’s scripts into the baying crowds beneath her.

The street is in an area that serves for black-market money exchange, yet in 1999, the frenzied crowd fell over themselves to capture the unleashed creative exchange that was once lost to the macho machine that makes up Latin-America.

An equally poetic piece is Limpieza Social (Social Cleansing), left. Video 2mins, shows the artist’s dainty frame being sprayed with a high-pressure hose, a method used to “calm demonstrations, or to wash recent arrivals in prison.”

In the Upper Gallery, a deafening cacophony accompanies the huge screens.

l The Body of Others is organized by Modern Art Oxford, curated by Clare Carolin, who is senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, London l It can be seen at Modern Art Oxford, Pembroke Street, Oxford, 01865 722733 or www.modernartoxford.org.uk l On March 11, at 6pm Sebastian Lopez, Guest Professor at the Art History Institute of Amsterdam University, and former director of InIVA, London, will discuss Galindo’s practice in the context of Latin American art and society. Booking is essential l The art gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and on Sundays from noon to 5pm. It is closed Mondays. Admission is free.

l The exhibition continues until March 29 2009.