Photo: Romain Boniface

SLARG warmly invites you to the public defense of Bianca Baldi’s doctoral research project, Play-White: Racial Passing and Embodied Images.

Bianca conducted this practice-led PhD between 2020 and 2026 at Sint Lucas Antwerpen (KdG) and ARIA (University of Antwerp), under the supervision of Dr Petra Van Brabandt, Dr Wesley Meuris, and Prof. Dr Diana Arbaiza.

The project approaches racial passing not as a fixed historical phenomenon, but as an embodied and material condition that unfolds through sensory, relational, and artistic processes. Working across glass, textile, pigment, sound, film, and photography, passing emerges through making as something lived at the surface of body and image: protective and violent, strategic and exhausting, visible and concealed.

Through exhibitions such as Sea Through Skin (on view at Extra City), Baldi’s work mobilises opacity, distortion, and transformation to resist fixed meanings. Passing appears not as a resolved identity, but as a mode of becoming, opening onto questions of memory, inheritance, ecological time, and more-than-human witnessing.

Date: Thursday 22 January
Time: 16:00–18:30 (CET)
Location: Kunsthal Extra City, Provinciestraat 112, 2018 Antwerp

Programme
16:00 – Public doctoral defense
Jury: Diana Arbaiza, Hicham Khalidi, George Tebogo Mahashe, Jyoti Mistry, Wesley Meuris, Petra Van Brabandt, Kurt Vanhoutte
18:00 – Laudatio by the supervisors
18:30 – Reception