In Sea Through Skin, artist Bianca Baldi (SA, 1985) explores the complex and deeply personal phenomenon of racial passing (or playing white in South African vernacular): being perceived, or made to be perceived, as part of another racial group. This solo exhibition marks the culmination of Baldi’s PhD in the arts at Sint Lucas Antwerp, titled Play-White: Racial Passing and Embodied Images. Through her image-making practice, she reflects on how identity, perception, and power shape how we see — and are seen.

The sea runs as a quiet undercurrent through the exhibition. It evokes fluidity, depth, and resistance; a force that refuses to be bordered or contained. For Baldi, the ocean is both metaphor and memory: tied to her mother’s fear of water, rooted in childhood trauma and the racially segregated beaches of apartheid South Africa. Under that regime, even the coastline was divided by race. In that contradiction, Baldi found a space for reflection.

At the heart of the exhibition is the cuttlefish: a sea creature that changes colour, texture, and shape to adapt to its surroundings. It becomes a symbol of camouflage and fluid identity. For Baldi, the cuttlefish offers a lens to think about passing — not only as a strategy of survival, but as a challenge to the visual codes we use to read identity. The project began with a personal discovery in her own family history, an encounter with the complexities and consequences of racial classification under apartheid that sparked years of artistic and intellectual inquiry.

Drawing from popular culture, literature, and historical contexts, Baldi examines how racial passing is shaped by systems of image-making. Her work invites us to reflect on how we perceive, label, and define one another. In Sea Through Skin, she brings together film, textiles, glass, photography, drawing, and installation to explore identity as something not fixed but shifting, shaped by history, context, and appearance.

Like the sea.
Like the cuttlefish.
Like many of us.