Donna Huanca: Cueva de copal at Arnolfini

Arnolfini are excited to present a new and immersive site-specific installation by Donna Huanca. Huanca’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, choreography, video and sensory interventions, all based around her exploration of the human body.

Image: Donna Huanca: Cueva de copal at Arnolfini. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin.

Huanca builds her experiential installations around the history and architecture of each new site, enhancing the sensory elements of visitors’ interactions using sound, scent, and texture. Her CUEVA DE COPAL presentation at Arnolfini plunges the viewer into a cocoon-like space, encouraging viewers to separate their experience from the world around them. Previous installations have seen the artist transform the Copenhagen Contemporary’s industrial space of the former B&W welding hall, the early 18th century palace of the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, as well as engage the high desert landscape surrounding the Ballroom Marfa, Texas. 

Huanca notes that: “The way that I set up an exhibition environment is a very intuitive process. The materials are important cultural references and traces – tools we use as humans to camouflage, express and explore the complexity of our ever disintegrating bodies, along with natural materials drawn from our ecosystems.”

Huanca’s work continuously builds on past remnants of her practice, ‘excavating’ and layering her own work, and transforming her live ‘skin’ paintings into new multi-layered and hybrid forms that sit somewhere between performance, painting and photography. 

Moving away from the live body as a key element in her work, new sculptures produced for the exhibition develop ideas first seen in the reflective sculptures shown in ESPEJO QUEMADA (meaning burnt mirror) at Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Here, Huanca incorporates mirrored and metallic surfaces as part of the installation, inviting audiences to view their own reflection alongside glimpses of body, skin and human form in her monumental and multi-panelled paintings. Through this, Huanca’s sensory experiences immerse her audiences in intimate moments, encouraging us to explore our own body in relation to perceptions of space and time.

Donna Huanca is represented by Peres Projects, Travesia Cuatro, and Simon Lee Gallery.

The exhibition will be open Tuesday to Sunday each week, 11am to 6pm, entry is free and will be bookable in advance via arnolfini.org.uk.