Donna Huanca

Donna Huanca blends performance and paint to defy the male gaze and decolonise contemporary art. Her multidisciplinary installations show painted models - which the artist refers to as ‘skin paintings’ - amidst serene environments created with sculpture, painting, photography, sound and scent. Symbolic gestures suffuse throughout: rectangular free-standing paintings represent phone screens or digital interfaces, while cobalt blue embodies female power. Huanca uses a range of materials including silicone, plastic, clay, sand, textiles, hair, turmeric and metal. This mix of artificial and organic materials became particularly pertinent in 2020 during the outbreak of Covid-19: “I wanted to acknowledge ‘nature’ in a new form, both toxic, artificial, yet protective. The layered scent of wood, mingled with the sanitary, antiseptic hand-sanitiser gel we are bathing in.”

Huanca’s process manifests her political ethos for social change. Because she works with people, a certain set of ethical perimeters - or ‘guidelines’ as the artist calls them - are required. Firstly, the personal relationships between Huanca and her models must be based on trust. Secondly, the models must feel safe within the environments that they are performing in, namely galleries and museums. As institutions are generally designed to house objects, not people, this often presents practical difficulties. But Huanca embraces such difficulties as an opportunity to disrupt business-as-usual, challenging intuitions to shift notions of ‘exhibition’ which are fundamentally rooted in colonial and sexist power structures. As a result, Huana changes the art world from inside to out in brave, incremental and powerful steps - just like those of her models.