Donna Huanca’s installations are activated by live performers and fuse tactile materials, such as clothing and cultural ephemera. Her focus is on the body- in particular the skin, which is simultaneously the surface on which our personhood is inscribed and the surface through which we experience the world around us. Huanca examines conventions of behavior in our interaction with bodies in space and the invisible histories that are accumulated through those gestures. By exposing the body and concealing it under layers of paint, cosmetics and latex, Huanca’s performers embody our instinctive reactions to flesh, which becomes both a familiar and an abstract, inaccessible subject. References to origins, memory, time, and identity run throughout Huanca’s work, which evokes the complexity of influences that shape who we are.
