Foto: Maan Barua, An Amphibious Urbanism, 2023-2024.
Donna Huanca, Foto: Tobias Willmann
In this talk, writer Jazmina Figueroa with curator Stefanie Reisinger and artist Donna Huanca will think about Huanca’s work in performance and conceptual art canons of artists such as Gego, (Gertrud Goldschmidt Hamburg 1912–1994 Caracas) who is of importance to Stuttgart’s cultural heritage, and worked in collaborations that included also performance and with metal, line-based compositions, employing techniques of making by hand.
There are considerable aesthetic contrasts between Gego’s and Huanca’s sculptural installations and performance collaborations. However, the artists are reminiscent of the other’s working practices in their use of found materials, works made by hand that enact »erratic fluidity«, and the non-mechanical constructions of space where the works unfold. Sharing the stage, the public arena, and cross-fertilization exist in both Huanca’s and Gego’s collaborative performance works that incorporate sound cultures and choreographic interventions to their working trajectories.
In 2017, the Fundación Gego in Caracas, Venezuela, where Gego lived and worked when she was displaced after her studies at the University of Stuttgart in 1939, agreed to a long-term loan of one hundred works by Gego to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Jazmina Figueroa, writer, and current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, invites Stefanie Reisinger, curator of Gego. The Architecture of an Artist at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and Donna Huanca to consider together the importance and atomization of the line between both Huanca and Gego within the ambit of performance.
Initiated by Jazmina Figueroa with support and cooperation by Akademie Schloss Solitude.
This event will be held in English.
A cooperation between Akademie Schloss Soiltude and ifa-Galerie Stuttgart.
Donna Huanca studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt and was the recipient of the DAAD Artist Frankfurt and a Fulbright research grant. The body and skin are ongoing points of focus in Huanca’s work, where she employs them as both surface and material. The painted performers, who populate the immersive environments composed of Huanca’s studio works, dissimulate amongst the various elements, joining and extending them, this oscillation in and out of sentience composes an allegory to the fragmentation of identity.
Jazmina Figueroa is a Berlin-based writer. In her work, she focuses on the consequences (or imaginaries) that correlate with entropy through recorded and arranged performance lectures, written works, and curation – as a positive force and non-linear movement.
Stefanie Reisinger is an Austrian art historian with a second degree in cultural and social anthropology. Most recently she has worked on an extensive research project on the artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt Hamburg 1912–1994 Caracas) and curated the exhibition and the eponymous catalogue Gego. The Architecture of an Artist. She teaches regularly at University of Stuttgart focusing on Latin American Art, Performance and Architecture in the 20th century. Currently she works on a catalogue raisonné on Gego’s works in public spaces in Caracas. Find more information on the exhibition Gego. Die Architektur einer Künstlerin here (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart).
participated in