Donna HUANCA | SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH) Preview Faurschou, New York City, US

Donna Huanca (b. 1980 in Chicago, US) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the human body and the natural world, through mark making, raw materials, immersive environments, and singular topographies. Encompassing painting, sculpture and live performance, as well as sound and scent works, Huanca’s installations are specially created for and intricately woven into the specific architectural spaces in which they are presented. 

Inspired by Indigenous systems of communication, where objects serve as multi-purpose signifiers, Huanca uses objects and materials as repositories that aggregate and convey knowledge, information, and memory. Deeply rooted in communal practice and ritual, her kaleidoscopic practice creates shared spaces for transcendence, meditation, and transformation.

The performers Huanca commissions to inhabit her installations expand her non-static vocabulary and their painted skin becomes a major element in the composition. Huanca is interested in the fluidity of earthly cycles such as birth, decay, and renewal, and her impermanent paintings on the performers’ bodies are photographed, collaged and manipulated into future works, masking and unmasking the traces of the human body beneath them. Through overlapping temporalities and narratives, Huanca’s multilayered works embody an allegory of both the fragmentation and connectedness of our shared human experience.

Huanca’s numerous solo exhibitions include the Museo de Arte Zapopan, Mexico (2023), Space K, Seoul (2023), the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2022), Arnolfini, Bristol (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2021), Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2019), Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark (2019), and the Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2018). Her work has entered numerous collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, YUZ Museum, Shanghai, Rubell Museum, Miami, and Belvedere Museum, Vienna, among others.