Bianca Baldi successfully defended her doctoral project Play-White: Racial Passing and Embodied Images on 22 January at Kunsthal Extra City, while her exhibition Sea Through Skin was still on view there. The practice-led PhD was developed between 2020 and 2026 at Sint Lucas Antwerpen (KdG) and ARIA (University of Antwerp), and departs from a deeply personal point of departure: the discovery that Baldi’s mother was reclassified as white under apartheid in 1984, exposing racial categorisation as a state-authored fiction extending into the most intimate domains of family and selfhood.

The research examines racial passing not as a fixed historical category, but as an embodied, material, and relational condition. Through artistic practice spanning glass, textile, pigment, sound, film, and photography, passing is approached as a mode of becoming shaped through processes of making and exhibition. The project foregrounds questions of visibility and concealment, memory and inheritance, and the ethical stakes of representation, situating the body as both archive and site of resistance at the intersection of personal narrative and state power.

Supervisors: Petra Van Brabandt (KdG), Wesley Meuris (KdG), and Diana Arbaiza (University of Antwerp).