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

 Peres Projects is pleased to announce SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), a solo exhibition by Donna Huanca at Faurschou New York. Marking the artist’s first major solo institutional presentation in New York, this new immersive and multi-sensory exhibition will run from October 21, 2023 through July 14, 2024.  

For this exhibition, Huanca has created a site-specific installation comprised of paintings and sculptures, as well as olfactory and sound works, which will be activated by a series of live performances, each one unique and specially commissioned for the occasion. Upcoming performances: Saturday, February 10; Friday, May 10; Friday, June 21.

In this new landscape, Huanca presents an extraction of primal sensory signals that proliferate in a vast space full of reflections, capturing many layers of a deconstructed simulacrum. Abounding in sensory information, SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH) interrupts vision and memory and will be ever-changing throughout the eight-month duration. 

Sculpted and shaped by mirrors, the exhibition space gradually unfolds as the viewer journeys among the works. In this endless kaleidoscope of nested landscapes where bodies are absorbed into their surroundings, experiences of time and space are reframed. The scale of Huanca’s paintings, amplified by the scent and sound that pervade the space, envelops the viewer, while the distinction between the individual and terrain dissolves in an interplay between the paintings, the reflective sculptures, and the viewer’s movements through the installation.

Imbued with multiple temporalities, Huanca’s paintings are derived from her durational performances. Using past performance documentation as the foundation for her subsequent exhibitions and works, the artist captures ephemeral moments to construct an ongoing narrative within her larger body of work. During each performance held throughout SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), painted performers, adorned with Huanca’s textural language, will leave their traces onto the installation, thus reflecting the non-static, evolutionary mark-making language that is key to Huanca’s densely layered work. 

With SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), Huanca creates a multifaceted space of both submergence and refuge, for one’s reflection to become camouflaged and embedded within the installation, thus encouraging a connected experience in reaction to an increasingly disembodied world.

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.