DONNA HUANCA INTERVENES IN THE CAAC WITH HER SENSORIAL LANGUAGE
The installation is constructed using the artist's usual practices, where sand, pigments, and translucent curtains come together with cosmology and contemporary languages.
La Capilla de Afuera, a space belonging to the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC), hosts MINA DE AURA, a site-specific project by Donna Huanca (Chicago, United States, 1980) that transforms the space into an environment where the pictorial and the corporeal—key lines of the artist’s practice—construct a sensorial language.
Curated by Jimena Blázquez Abascal, the intervention delves into the meaning of the chapel as a symbolic and spiritual place, but also one with enormous historical significance. Within its walls, mercantile and cultural exchanges between Spain and the Americas took place during the colonial period. This memory, combined with the sensitivity embedded in its architecture, enables the unfolding of a multi-layered experiential concept.
By superimposing a large-scale, photographically based painting over the Baroque altarpiece, the proposal connects with a mirrored steel sculpture that interacts with the natural light and spatial arrangement. Donna Huanca structures her intervention around connections already explored in her work. She advances the correlation between Baroque imagery, native cosmologies, and the expressive power of painting. The substrate—the skin she often works with—is here the space itself, which acts as a body through which the various materials speak.
Sand, mirrored steel, and pigments deepen an invitation to contemplation and reflection infused with mysticism. The space, wrapped in translucent curtains that modulate natural light and create a dreamlike sensation, unites the celestial with the earthly through the sand-covered floor. It conveys a continuity between ritual practice and the temporal and site-specific, functioning as a record of the activity generated in relation to the viewer, in a kind of performative action.
Donna Huanca. MINA DE AURA can be visited until April 5, 2026 at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC), Américo Vespucio 2, Seville (Spain).
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