ABOUT THE Work

Live Performance

Asian Art Museum (2014)
Broad Museum (2016)
Plaza de Diego in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2016)
Maccarone Gallery, NYC (2016)
Anderson Collection Museum, Stanford, California (2017)
ExTeresa Arte Actual, D.F. Mexico (2019)

Using laughter and her own nude body as material, Ibarra uncovers the vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one’s own skin, but also one’s own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood. By using endurance-based laughter and filling a nylon cocoon with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements” (blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls, and fake breasts), the performer visualizes and embodies the skein of race, negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.