Donna Huanca: WET SLIT at Simon Lee, London

Walking into Donna Huanca’s exhibition, WET SLIT, in London’s Simon Lee Gallery in early March is a strange experience in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic that has spread across the globe. Huanca’s art is typically peopled with performers, adorned in various shades of body paint who move through installations that combine painting, sculpture, sound and stagecraft. In this solo show of the Bolivian-American artist, however, the performer is conspicuously absent; here the body is instead abstracted throughout the space, traces left of interactions that occurred in previous works, in moments of intimacy and collective proximity, during a time when being with kin had different stakes.