This object is a part of Joiri Minaya's performance-based work, Sunset Slit. In this performance, Minaya repeatedly immersed her braided head in a bucket of clean water and whipped her hair back. The water turned black and began to stain her white shirt, her white bikini underneath and the white rug, on which she was kneeling. The rug was made out of 18 sewn white towels.

Sunset Slit parts from the exhausted image of a woman emerging from a big body of water and whipping her hair back. Usually presented in a still or slowed down form, this pop-culture image carries a tired narrative that builds fantasies of leisure and pleasure from the cliché pairing of women and idyllic landscapes. By reproducing this idealized gesture over and over again in the incongruous, almost opposite context of a NYC basement, Minaya intended to create a space where meaning can be transformed through the absurd and the pointlessly laborious.

Sunset Slit is part of a body of work that deals generally with otherness, self-consciousness and displacement, and specifically relates to how the people and environments of the tropical regions have been historically idealized by others, and the subsequent internalization and re-performing of those fantasies by the subjects in which they are originated in the first place.