Guillermo Gómez-Peña

de Luis Miguel León

"Mexican in documentado" by Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico City 1955, moved to the US in 1978) is the first individual exhibition in Mexico of one of the pioneering artists of performance art, presenting more than 150 works, including costumes, videos, photoperformance, installations, documents, texts and paraphernalia from his studies in Mexico City and in San Francisco, California._ With his exhibitionist temperament and his numerous books (most of them out-of-print), Gómez-Peña contributed to intensify the 20th-century debates surrounding sexual emancipation, cultural and gender diversity, border coexistence, and tensions between Mexico and the United States, today again the subject to sharp disagreements. "Preceded by a strong reputation as a disturbing performer, in the 1990's Guillermo Gómez-Peña offered to whom worked in the "chilango" cultural world, a powerful underground figure, mysterious in his brief appearances, although consistent. He imposed the capacity for outrage, sarcasm and self-parody with which he fought racism, xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia." (HKB Translation) --Page [6].