BRISTOL.- Arnolfini are presenting a new and immersive site-specific installation by Donna Huanca. Huanca’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, choreography, video and sensory interventions, all based around her exploration of the human body.
Huanca builds her experiential installations around the history and architecture of each new site, enhancing the sensory elements of visitors’ interactions using sound, scent, and texture. Her CUEVA DE COPAL presentation at Arnolfini plunges the viewer into a cocoon-like space, encouraging viewers to separate their experience from the world around them. Previous installations have seen the artist transform the Copenhagen Contemporary’s industrial space of the former B&W welding hall, the early 18th century palace of the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, as well as engage the high desert landscape surrounding the Ballroom Marfa, Texas.
Huanca notes that: “The way that I set up an exhibition environment is a very intuitive process. The materials are important cultural references and traces – tools we use as humans to camouflage, express and explore the complexity of our ever disintegrating bodies, along with natural materials drawn from our ecosystems.”
Huanca’s work continuously builds on past remnants of her practice, ‘excavating’ and layering her own work, and transforming her live ‘skin’ paintings into new multi-layered and hybrid forms that sit somewhere between performance, painting and photography.
Moving away from the live body as a key element in her work, new sculptures produced for the exhibition develop ideas first seen in the reflective sculptures shown in ESPEJO QUEMADA (meaning burnt mirror) at Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Here, Huanca incorporates mirrored and metallic surfaces as part of the installation, inviting audiences to view their own reflection alongside glimpses of body, skin and human form in her monumental and multi-panelled paintings. Through this, Huanca’s sensory experiences immerse her audiences in intimate moments, encouraging us to explore our own body in relation to perceptions of space and time.
Donna Huanca is represented by Peres Projects, Travesia Cuatro, and Simon Lee Gallery.
The interdisciplinary practice of Donna Huanca (born 1980, Chicago, USA) evolves across painting, sculpture, performance, choreography, video and sound, crafting a unique visual language based in collaboration and innovation. At the very heart of her work is an exploration of the human body and its relationship to space and identity. Her live sculptural pieces, or in the artist’s words, ‘original paintings’, work primarily with nude bodies, drawing particular attention to the skin as a complex surface via which we experience the world around us. Largely collaborative, the partnership between artist and model is imperative to Huanca’s practice. By exposing the naked body, while at the same time concealing it beneath layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca and her performers urge the viewer to confront their own instinctive response to the human form, which, in the artist’s hands, is both familiar and distorted, decorative and abstract.
Huanca’s two-dimensional painting practice is fundamentally linked to the performative elements of her oeuvre. Photographs of her performers’ decorated bodies are blown up and transposed to canvas, where they are re-worked with paint. Gesture is enlarged and amplified; the soundlessness of her performances reverberates across her abstract compositions. During this process, Huanca engages with the colours and forms painted on her models, resulting in a genuine interaction between the ephemeral choreography of performance art and the permanence of painting. The glacial movements of her wordless performers result in a tactile painting practice rooted both in natural process and mediated dialogue, which freezes movement in a static medium that nonetheless hints at its inspiration and origins.
Huanca graduated in Fine Art at the University of Houston, 2004, and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting, ME, in 2006, and at Städelschule, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, Germany. She has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Travesia Curatro, Madrid, Spain; Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany; Zabludowicz Collection; London, UK; and MOMA PS1, New York, USA. Recent group exhibitions have included shows at Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; The Strand, London, UK; Contemporary Arts Centre, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO), Rome, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, USA and The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, USA.
She is a recipient of the Hirshhorn Artist Award, 2016; Fulbright Scholarship, 2012; DAAD Artist Grant, 2009/10 and the Francis Greenberg Award, 2008, amongst others. Her work is held by a number of international public collections including Belvedere Collection, Vienna, Austria; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Espacio 1414/Berezdivin Collection, Santurce; Zublowdowicz Collection, London, UK, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, USA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York, USA.
