Quiet Dance: Donna Huanca’s Scar Tissue (Blurred Earth)

Donna Huanca is unapologetic. Donna Huanca likes sensory details. Donna Huanca does not like institutions.

If you read about Huanca, you get an immediate impression of her character: known, well-traveled and exhibited, and strong in what she stands for. For the press, she is often sincere albeit vauge; for her friends, that sincerity sharpens to a frankness, a deep recognition that labors born of love are also those that are often raised to fight.

And strikingly beautiful.

For her latest at Faurshau, Huanca turned on bright lights, strong pigments, and a choreography left entirely unknown to the viewers and performers alike.

The Greenpoint space is arranged with various blocks, created off of loose drawings that were then brought to life. “I was trying to think about a 3D room as a flat object and it being something that you walk through,” Huanca said of the sculptures. The blocks are covered in paint and navigated by a cast of rotating performers, nude and also covered in paint, with elaborate hairstyles and make-up. They crawl up the rugged surfaces, languidly lean against them, serenely walk from one end to the other. They pour mysterious liquids over ice, watching it trickle down.

They do not touch each other, and they do not look at the viewers.

“It’s not necessarily a performance in a way that we typically think about it, but it’s focused around that person’s freedom and being seen.”

‘Being seen’ isn’t relegated to the performers and the sculptures alone. In addition to the large structures and stealthy, slow movements of the performers, the room has various mirrors and glass. You are among the crowd, and you can see yourself reflected — distorted, accurate, and reacting in real time.

Walking through the exhibit, you are immediately taken by how bright the lights are and how white everything apart from the installation is. This has a dazzling effect that compels viewers to be quiet, quieter than usual at an opening: forced to re-orient to the space, there is a feeling of reverence, like you were at an open church for worship, or a lofty museum, which in fact you are.

It is impossible not to notice the way the performers walk casually among the crowd and also studiously ignore them. There is, as Huanca intended, so much to observe — but also become a part of. In the mirrors, everyone is reflected. It was important for her to “zoom in on these body distortions and trying to trigger your senses…[and] respond to the art gallery being a place of commercial transaction and transform this space into a lab: a place that honors the creative process rather than the finished product.”

There was no over-arching narrative to the blocks, to the unchoreographed movements of the performers. They were of mixed race and gender and smeared in paint; the twisted mirrors and glass held curved orbs that magnified and shifted your views. The installation was organic; moving slowly and without boundary, it invited you to move with it.

As I carefully orbited around the objects and performers, I noticed a third part of the piece that went unmentioned: people in white lab-coats, standing inconspicuously outside the perimeter of each sculpture. They were, I realized, tenders — taking care that the performers went unaccousted and received rest or support if needed.

This protection felt obvious — but it also seemed critical that they were in lab coats, as part of the installation: witness and protector, attuned in a way that the viewers were not. They were not covert; instead, they were highlighted by their uniforms, made to be recognized and accepted as part of something greater.

This feels significant. Performance art is so often political — by core definition, it involves action, many times brutally confrontational, by the witness. But Scar Tissue (Blurred Earth) was distinctly defiant in this regard: it was very pretty, and demanded little. Like the drawing Huanca sought to stretch into the three-dimensional, its intention felt deceptively simple. There was no music but there was a rhythm, executed in the regular movements of the performers and the anchor points of the sculptures. Under those searing lights, Huanca succeeds in creating the illusion of the lab. Whether you were wearing a white coat or not, you were a part of it, with a distinct if unnamed role. By stepping in the space Huanca allows us to create and imagine with her — to enter the lab, to be part of the spectacle. I talked to many of the white-coated protectors, and they responded, even cheerfully. Scar Tissue (Blurred Earth) was reminder why we attend performance art — not all art is a commentary, not all spectacle is performative. It can just be a form of play and experimentation, for form and experimentation’s sake. To provoke and study a reaction. And that can be enough — transcendent, even, to see yourself walk among strangers.

Scar Tissue (Blurred Earth) is on view at Faurshou, NY from October 21, 2023 to July 14, 2024.