Guillermo Galindo is an experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist, and Jungian Tarotist. The extent of his work redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition, and the intersections between all art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality, and social awareness.
Galindo’s artistic practice emerges from the crossroads between sound, sight and performance and includes everything from orchestral compositions, instrumental works and opera, to sculpture, visual arts, computer interaction, electro-acoustic music, film making, instrument building, three-dimensional installation and live improvisation. His acoustic compositions include major chamber and solo works, two symphonies commissioned by the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) symphony orchestra, the Oakland symphony orchestra and choir, and two operas with libretto by Guillermo Gomez Peña and Anne Carson. His interactive string quartet Remote Control, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet for the Fifty for the Future series, will be premiered at the San Francisco Jazz Festival in April 2018.
In 2017, Galindo created his series Echo Exodus for documenta14. This group of works has been shown both in Athens, Greece and in Kassel, Germany. For Echo Exodus, Galindo continues building sonic devices and graphic scores, this time from belongings of European refugees. Fluchtzieleuropaschiffbruchschallkörper, an enormous iconic piece made from two wreckage immigrant boats found in the island of Lesbos, is controversially shown at documenta hall in 2017. Border Cantos, an award winning book published by Aperture Foundation and a traveling exhibit featuring a unique collaboration between Galindo and award-winning American photographer Richard Misrach featuring Galindo’s sonic devices and musical scores made from detritus left behind by immigrants, has been shown at the San Jose Museum of Art (2016), Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2016), Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas (2017), and Pace Gallery, New York (2017).
Galindo’s graphic scores and three-dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe, Asia, and around the world, including documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017), and CTM Festival, Berlin (2017), FIAC Art Fair, Paris (2017), Rusk Festival, Finland (2017), and Miami Art Basel (2017). His work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), NPR City Arts and Lectures, Vice Magazine (London), RTS Switzerland, CBC (Canada), California Sunday Magazine (US), Reforma Newspaper (Mexico), CNN, and the New York Times, among many others. Galindo’s recent solo exhibit Sonic Botany, created on the occasion of Pacific Standard Time and shown at the Huntington Library, comments on European colonial codexes, integrating genomes of plants and insects into a sight and sound environment. Galindo will be a Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University during the Spring 2018.
Image: Guillermo Galindo, Fluchtzieleuropaschiffbruchschallkörper, 2017. Fiberglass and wood; 3.05 x 2.88 x 1.85 meters and 2.53 x 5.4 x 1 meters respectively. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Nils Klinger.
