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)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2026)

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.

Nude Laughing has been performed in various sites. In each performance, Ibarra responds to all the complexities that come with engaging varied environments and the specific objects and multiple characters that belong to it. Mindful of these specificities and complexities, Ibarra contends with both the hostility and anxieties surrounding our current time and the class, gendered and racial hierarchies in tension with the museum’s holdings and/or the site itself. She considers these holdings as not only the museum’s collections, but also the spatial expressions, structured choreographies, broad histories, rhythms and flows that constitute a site’s political and epistemic intensities.