Carnal art, Donna Huanca, interview by Agnese Torres

Interview by Agnese Torres

Photography by Richie Shazam

For some the body is a temple, for others an amusement park that must be enjoyed, for Donna Huanca (1980, Chicago, USA) it is a vessel of alluring mystery. It is through this beautiful and tangled mixture of bones, flesh, and blood that we experience our own existence unfolding in time and space. Huanca's art is carnal, physical, it speaks of an ancestral world, while remaining firmly anchored to contemporaneity. It challenges the virtualization of the present, but is not immune to its charm; it delves into the notion of artifice, but draws inspiration from the manifestations of nature. Combining raw materials, painting, sculpture, performance, and even sound, Huanca refuses any attempt at categorization. Although beautiful, her works are not decorative; indeed, her practice often escapes the constraint of two dimensions to penetrate the concreteness of human life and experience its volatile mutability, sometimes gentle and slow, sometimes abrupt and sudden.

In a world that is moving more and more towards digitalization, your art seems like a return to physicality and ancestral, raw aesthetics. How come?

Through my practice, I want to create an experience of space and time that allows the viewer to reconnect with both themselves and their environment. The increasing digitalization of our relationships with the world and others comes with a form of escapism and disembodiment that my art pushes back on. My installations induce a sense of mindfulness, drawing from a repertoire of raw, sensory materials, colors, sounds, and scents inspired by biology and geology. They are very challenging, if not impossible, to document and share online because they are designed as ecosystems that engage the entire body. It’s something to be experienced rather than just flattened and seen online.

The body is one of the starting points of your practice. Where does your fascination about the human body and physicality come from?

I want my work to be as universal as possible, so I’m working with something that we can all relate to, since we are all in the same predicament—we are all decaying bodies. 

The body is a world in itself, its own ecosystem. And at the same time, it’s the vessel for all our experiences of the world, existence, time, and space. The skin in particular is fascinating. It serves as a bridge between the interior and exterior, as a membrane that contains and protects us while being the interface through which we interact with the world and others. As a living surface in perpetual transformation, it records our trauma like a diary. The body is both universal and the most intimate and singular thing, making it an endless source of inspiration for me. It’s prevalent in the materials, textures, and ornaments that I use in my work. They all relate to the body and evoke pleasure, protection, or pain, prompting the viewer to contemplate the meaning of the human body today, as well as its relevance as we get closer and closer to losing our singularity and becoming robots. 

Among your most famous works is the “skin paintings” series. Can you explain to me what this is about?

They are ephemeral paintings created directly on the bodies of the performers with whom I collaborate. Each reflects the specificities of the individual while obscuring the body, making it hardly recognizable. The skin paintings are an essential element of the performances that activate my installations. Although ephemeral, they continue to exist as traces in my canvas paintings: images documenting these performances are collaged and printed onto the canvas, then covered with a new layer of paint. By navigating between different temporalities, extending the ephemeral and merging transience with permanence, this work is an ongoing and self-sustained study. 

For the Brazilian contemporary artist Anna Maria Maiolino, painting is strongly anchored to the performative dimension of the body and therefore to movement and action. It seems to be the same for you, am I right?

Performance is really a core element of my work. It might even be how it all began, as it goes back to my experience as a musician and my connection to improvised music. Even though I no longer perform myself, this performative dimension permeates my entire practice and is not limited to the public performances that take place during my exhibitions. Painting, for me, is a very physical experience where I engage my whole body. I paint with my hands, so there is really a direct, physical confrontation with the canvas (often monumental in size), as well as a dialogue with the performance whose documentation forms the bedrock of the painting. Additionally, I paint in a very gestural, expressive way, which contrasts with the stillness of the performances. The paintings serve as markers of the intense activity taking place within a body, even when still, which remains imperceptible during the performance.

Color seems to play an important role in your works, especially blue and all its numerous shades. Do you associate a particular meaning with the colors you employ?

Just like most of the materials, sounds, and scents I incorporate into my practice, the colors I use are inspired by nature, geology, botany, and so on. Blue, for instance, is a truly elemental color. You find it in the sky, the seas, and even in the earth, like in certain gemstones. I am also very drawn to colors that may seem artificial or otherworldly but are in fact present in the natural world—in underwater worlds or the plumage of certain birds for instance. This tension between the natural and the artificial says a lot about our relationship with the natural world and our perception of what is natural and what is not.

The variety of materials in your sculptural practice is also amazing. Is it the result of thoughtful choices? Where do you source them? 

Collecting materials, sounds, scents, and colors is a way for me to familiarize myself with the world—it is my own language. Regardless of the medium, my works are collages of elements gathered through my experiences and travels. In my sculptures, in particular, I layer various fabrics and tactile materials selected for their color or texture, especially materials with a strong corporeal quality, such as leather or latex. Many of them are fragments of costumes worn by my performers, which I recycle in the sculptures. I keep all the materials worn by my collaborators during performances because I believe they retain a part of their DNA, carrying with them these histories and presences from one work to the next.

You often bring together different media such as painting, sculpture, video, and even scent and sound. One could say that your art knows no boundaries. Is that true?

Categorizations are irrelevant to me as I use whatever medium I feel suits best for creating a visceral bodily experience. In fact, at some point in my life, I was nomadic for a few years, and I believe that crossing borders and boundaries, in art as in other aspects of life, is also a part of my identity. For instance, I didn’t identify myself as a “painter” until recently. I have always navigated between media, combining them to create immersive environments that engage all the senses. A significant source of inspiration in this regard is the Urkupiña Festival, which I attended as a child during summers spent in Bolivia with my family. It was an extraordinary fusion of colors, sounds, dances, and couture—and my first encounter with a total work of art.

In your art shows you resort to performers as physical activators of the exhibitions. In your opinion, what role have movements such as performance art and body art had in the history of art?

They played a very important role in breaking down hierarchies and boundaries, opening up incredible spaces of freedom. For female artists in particular, they saw these art forms as a means to reassert their authorship, their status as artists, as well as reclaim ownership of their own bodies. Beyond “body art” as conceptualized since the 1960s, I am also very interested in body art and self-decoration as primal forms of communication and self-discovery. 

A couple of years ago, Marina Abramović in a conversation with philosopher Adrian Parr stated that “Today, people are tired of just looking at something; they want to be part of something; and they want to have their own personal experience”. How important is the emotional and physical audience’s reaction to your works in your practice?

I’ve always liked blurring the lines between the audience and the performers, creating a sense of equality and shared space. Through my work, I really want to create a space that serves as an oasis, a place of respite from the outside world. Each exhibition transforms the interior of a given architectural setting in order to transport the audience to another reality or dimension. It’s all about stepping into something that keeps changing throughout the duration of the exhibition, and the audience is actively engaged in this transformation. 

Could you name one or more exhibition/s of yours in which the art-spectator relationship had a very special role?

In 2016, I created the installation “SCAR CYMBALS” (at the Zabludowicz Collection in London) whose soundscape was made up of 40 individual tracks. Each track was activated by infrared motion sensors responding to the movements of the audience in the exhibition space. Viewers were thus actively participating in the exhibition by creating sounds through their bodily movements—even though many remained unaware of it!

However, beyond this specific example, the audience always plays a big part in my installations. And even more so since the pandemic. At some point, because I could no longer present live performances due to Covid-19 restrictions, I started using mirror sculptures. They served as stand-ins for the absent performers, while engaging the audience in the installation, inviting them to become active participants.

How do you relate to nudity in your practice? Unfortunately, in our society the female body is still a victim of objectification and a source of shame and discomfort for many women.

It is very important to me to present nudity in a way that avoids sensationalism and resists any form of objectification. The performers in my installations are never fully naked; they are painted, their bodies adorned with textural ornaments. Moreover, the sculptures and mirrors in the exhibition also serve as a refuge for the performers, further camouflaging their bodies. I would say that my work is not so much about nudity as it is about embodiment. Additionally, in the mirrors, the bodies of the performers and those of the spectators are juxtaposed, which disrupts the classical power dynamic between object and subject, or observer and observed. In my installations, I aim to project a space that values care, trust, and harmony, which requires a rethinking of the relationship with the body, both one’s own and that of others.

In “BLISS POOL” (Space K, Seoul, March 9 – June 8, 2023) the visitors were confronted with their own reflection thanks to mirrors scattered across the gallery premises. What meaning do you attribute to the theme of reflection and self-awareness?

My goal is to transform the exhibition space into an oasis, a respite from the outside world. Through glacial movements and deconstructed primal sensorial signals that engage the viewer’s sight, smell, and hearing, the performances elongate time, slowing down our current experience of the world. These nuances cannot be photographed or described, they must be experienced. I want these experiences to be immediate and transcend the art world. 

The use of mirrors is the closest I can come to working with water or vapor. Mirrors are very sensitive to their environment as they receive all the information surrounding them. Reflecting upon them offers each viewer a truly unique perspective. The mirror sculptures are amorphous forms that are layered and fluid and can’t be described easily. These shapeshifters are adorned with copious amounts of jewelry that further refract your point of view, as their reflective and convex surfaces expand the reflections into an infinity of fractured fragments.

I want to create the conditions for each visitor to have a very intimate and singular experience. With AI, we are in an era of automation where many of our choices and preferences are determined by algorithms, leading to a homogenization of our experiences. In a way, my installations are resisting this tendency.

Regarding your latest exhibition “VENAS DEL CAPULLO” (November 9–December 23, 2023) at Sean Kelly gallery, New York, you stated: “With the installation and title, I wanted to respond to the art gallery being a place of commercial transaction and transform this space into a lab: a place that honors the creative process rather than the finished product.” How would you describe your relationship with the commercial sphere of the art world and the role played by its intermediaries, such as galleries, art dealers, etc.?

It’s important for me to collaborate with other creative people in the art world who understand the importance of bringing experiences into rigid spaces such as museums and galleries that my community would never normally occupy or feel comfortable in. 

Usually, there’s a learning curve when it comes to understanding the implications of presenting live performances. Behind every performance there is an entire support infrastructure that often goes unnoticed when looking at my work alone. Most of what I present and focus on in the studio is non-commercial and requires a lot of labor, detail, and support. 

I believe it’s crucial for galleries not to limit themselves to their commercial activities—their lives would be so boring! They play an essential role in discovering and supporting artists and have the potential to play a part in the creative act as well—which, of course, first requires that both parties trust each other. This kind of trust and support system has always been part of the relationship with my long-standing gallery Peres Projects. It’s also part of the history of Sean Kelly Gallery, which has played a significant role in the development of experimental performance art in New York from the 1990s until today. Good galleries understand the value of experimentation. In addition to providing financial support for each artist’s wellbeing, they use their resources to support artists in taking non-commercial risks, which is vital for the artistic process. Achieving this balance is not easy, but when it’s reached, it proves incredibly fruitful for everyone involved.