In this performance, artist Xandra Ibarra uses endurance-based laughter and her nude body to uncover the vexed relation racialized subjects have not only to their own skin, but also to their entanglements with whiteness and white womanhood. As she laughs and fills a nylon cocoon with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements” including blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls, and fake breasts, Ibarra visualizes and embodies the skein of race, negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.

Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias La Chica Boom, is from El Paso and Juarez, on the United States–Mexico border, and is currently based in Oakland. She works across performance, video, and sculpture to address the borders between proper and improper racialized, gendered, and queer subjects.

See more work by Ibarra and 11 other contemporary artists in the exhibition “Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude.”

This performance contains nudity and may not be suitable for all audiences.