【Online Performace + Talk】
Daniela DE LA TORRE “Why Would You Do That?“
Date | Sunday, July 19, 2026 · 10:30 AM–12:00 PM (UTC+8)
Venue | Online

Artists |  Daniela DE LA TORRE
Panelist | Doreen A. RÍOS
Moderator | Emily Hsiang-Yun HUANG
90min + Q&A"

Registration｜Please register on the Vanishing Acts exhibition page.
*​​​All the events will be conducted in English and Mandarin.

Introduction
In Why Would You Do That?, Daniela DE LA TORRE stages a fugitive act. Shot in the intimate, worn-in rooms of her grandmother’s house—where family ghosts already linger in the furniture—the artist turns domestic space into a confessional box and a haunted castle. She appears as a kind of princess, but not the triumphant kind. This princess wears a puffy dress stitched from childhood bed sheets, a costume of faded dreams and soft armor. She is a spectre of the artist she once imagined becoming: the rebellious genius, the celebrated rule-breaker.

Instead, DE LA TORRE wrestles with shame, precarity, and the real threat of disappearing. She watches herself dissolve between the need to make art and the need to simply survive. The performance tracks her fear of becoming a ghost in her own life—erased by exhaustion, gentrification, and the quiet violence of a world that calls art a luxury. Yet in her grandmother’s house, where personal history hums through every corner, she refuses to fade quietly. She turns her potential disappearance into the work itself. Why Would You Do That? is a vigil for the artist who keeps almost vanishing—and a stubborn, tender act of staying visible.


Artists |  Daniela DE LA TORRE
Daniela DE LA TORRE (Mexico, b.1997) graduated in Visual Arts from The “La Esmeralda” National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking (ENPEG) and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Oxford.

She works with performance and textiles to break the continuum of experience in offering a moment of suspension of disbelief, a backdrop for a perfectly weird date. Anecdotes, scraps of fabric, and pop culture references perform and attack as outbursts (more or less memetic). By cutting and pasting the present and the past, the possessed and the desired, these samples are intertwined to question the subjectivity of the young female artist, the entrepreneurial gospel of late capitalism and its toxic conceptions of success, as well as the narratives and images of femininity imposed by mass culture as aspirational ideals.

Her work has been presented at museums, galleries and art fairs in the United Kingdom and Mexico where she currently works. She has been included in publications surveying contemporary Mexican art, such as The word as artistic language: textual practices in Mexico by Eloísa VIRAMONTES and Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance by Irmgard EMMELHAINZ.


Panelist | Doreen A. RÍOS
Doreen A. RÍOS (Mexico, 1992) is an independent curator and researcher. Her work focuses on technological disobedience in contemporary art, tactical media, and new materialities. Founder and director of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the research and exhibition of art produced through digital media and co-founder of the experimental research project Unidad de Conciencias Colectivas Terrestres. She served as chief curator at Centro de Cultura Digital from 2019 to 2021.

​​​Doreen graduated with a Masters in Contemporary Curating from Winchester School of Arts, specialising in digital cultures, and with a degree in Architecture from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. She’s currently pursuing a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at University of California, San Diego. She’s part of the International Selectors Committee for Lumen Art Prize as well as the Leonardo Peer Review Panel.
https://anti-materia.org/


Moderator | Emily Hsiang-Yun HUANG
Hsiang-Yun Huang is a researcher and visual artist from Taiwan. Her research interests focus on the relationship between body and technology from the perspective of postcolonialism, cyberfeminism, digital materialism and critical AI. Projects she has curated include Net.Open public program and www.counterarchive.commons at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, IMPAKT Festival-Our Terms, Our Conditions, Taipei Digital Art Festival-Fake It Real, and Embodied Interface. Her dance films often derived from her poetry on the vulnerability of (non-)human existence, with a focus on collective mourning and digital intimacy. She is supported by the Mondriaan Artist Start Grant(NL) and National Culture and Arts Foundation(TW). Her works have been exhibited at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Cinedance Festival at Eye Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Ars Electronica, Kikk Festival, and panke.gallery.  
https://linktr.ee/flyun


｜Other Notes｜The online link will be emailed to registrants on July 16.