In Conversation with Donna Huanca

Donna Huanca’s artistic practice samples our fear of skin. In her exhibitions, models wearing skin-colored body stockings stand, kneel, or sit in the exhibition space, sometimes on a pedestal or behind Plexiglas. Nudity is a tradition of contemporary art, and juxtaposing skin and painterly surface summons the spirits of Yves Klein and Kazuo Shiraga, whose masterpieces hosted the skin as poltergeist—a noise-making spirit, an invisible specter whose absent presence is defined by the traces of its own movement, and who is cloaked by the bodily movements (the corporeal freedom) it stages.