Donna Huanca, an artist of Bolivian-American descent, creates art that challenges the male gaze while exploring narratives that center on feminine and indigenous perspectives, as well as mark-making. Her installations, which often incorporate painting, sculpture, and live performance, are intricately woven into the specific architectural spaces in which they are presented. Huanca’s art is deeply rooted in ritual practice and serves as a conduit for transcendence, meditation, and transformation.
In 2022, Huanca created a captivating and immersive architectural environment for her commissioned exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington. The space featured a vast stage of interlocking ovoid/cellular forms, landscaped with white sand and six mirrored “screen” sculptures, along with a selection of other sculptural work. Surrounding the gallery were four mural-sized paintings, each representing one of the four seasons. Huanca’s goal was to provide viewers with a complete sensory experience, engaging them in a kaleidoscopic exploration of their own reflection, the works on display, as well as sound and olfactory pieces. By inducing a slippage of space and time, the installation encouraged participants to lose themselves while also finding themselves within the transformative and immersive environment.
Huanca defies the male gaze and decolonizes contemporary art by blending performance and paint. Her multidisciplinary installations feature painted models, referred to by Huanca as “skin paintings,” situated in serene environments created using sculpture, painting, photography, sound, and scent. Throughout her work, symbolic gestures are abundant, such as rectangular free-standing paintings representing phone screens or digital interfaces, and cobalt blue embodying female power. Huanca uses a range of materials, including silicone, plastic, clay, sand, textiles, hair, turmeric, and metal.
The artist’s process reflects her political ethos, centered around social change.
The artist’s process reflects her political ethos, centered around social change. As she works with people, a set of ethical guidelines is required, including trust-based personal relationships with her models and the creation of safe environments for their performance within galleries and museums. Huanca disrupts conventional exhibition practices, which are fundamentally rooted in colonial and sexist power structures. In doing so, she changes the art world from the inside out, in bold and powerful steps, akin to those of her models.
At the heart of Huanca’s art lies her inspiration drawn from the chaos, resilience, and creativity of the natural world. Clothing, which she sources from second-hand and local shops during her travels around the world, serves as powerful stand-ins for the human body in her work. Since 2012, Huanca has also incorporated live models into her pieces, inviting them to improvise and interact with her surrounding sculptures and installations. Her work is imbued with references to origins, memory, time, and identity, capturing the complexity of influences that shape who we are.
The artist is heading to Seoul, South Korea, to hold a solo exhibition at Space K. Additionally, she is showing works for an exhibition on display at Museo de Arte Zapopan in Jalisco, Mexico. She is currently represented by Peres Projects. We conducted an interview with Donna Huanca for our latest Hypeart Visits feature, exploring her unconventional and trailblazing methods of artistic expression in diverse fields.
