Cantando Bajito: Chorus
Curated by Roxana Fabius, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes, installed at the Ford Foundation Gallery from October 8 — December 7, 2024.
Chorus evokes a twofold meaning: a choral body—an assembly of disparate voices that build together—and the refrain of a song, which carries both a repeating central idea, and a ‘hook’ that draws others in to add their voice. Chorus invites all to enter into a collective performance. This performance aims to reflect what sociologist Leticia Sabsay has called the ‘aesthetics of vulnerability.’ This concept shows the liberating potential of bodies that face vulnerability en masse, rallying against the all-too-present aesthetics of cruelty that seeks to divide people along gendered, sexualized, racialized, and national lines. Chorus is a call to join in a multivocal refrain of resistance transcending dividing lines. Artworks in Chorus reflect how vulnerability can act as an effective mobilizing force, and the exhibition recognizes the agency of those facing and countering systemic violence together.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus is the third in the series, “the final movement”. The first, Cantando Bajito: Testimonies, opened on March 5th, 2024. The second, Cantando Bajito: Incantations opened on June 5th, 2024.
I don’t want it to end, but to follow it forward, branch off into possible futures, and a more loving array of now.
You can see the exhibition checklist for Chorus here — I quote it throughout this post.
vulnerability as a mobilizing force
Before 2012, the only archives of trans memory in Argentina were police, psychiatric and morgue records. But with the emergence and establishment of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, survivors take their place as archivists, collecting, conserving, and making sense of “photographs, videos, newspaper and magazine clippings, and other items” that you find in homes. They make memory available to the public, transforming not only the past.
Reflecting the archive’s deep significance, the installation offers
a monumental homage to the power of this community’s collective
care and activism.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina): Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes), 2024, Archival photographs, piano, and frames.
Dimensions variable.
More about Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s memory work
- El Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT)
- TIME REGAINED: María Belén Correa and Cecilia Estalles speak with Devan Díaz and Thora Siemsen about El Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, ArtForum
Tania Candiani: Manifestantes (Protestors), 2022-2024, Cotton canvases embroidered with cotton thread, high-density acrylic paint, and acrylic sealer.
118 x 55 x 1 ¾ inches each.
This series emerged with the “Glitter Revolution,” a massive protest movement that followed the rape of a teenage girl by Mexico City police in 2019, named for the showers of pink glitter protesters used as a symbolic tool of public resistance. These protests brought people from different feminist groups together in shared rage, a local expression of burgeoning movements against genderbased violence worldwide, and in Latin America especially.
Sourcing images of protestors marching in Afghanistan and Argentina, from different online sites, Candiani embroiders the sound of their voices rising, calling out, calling on us.
The thread and the act of sewing in these works become a form of amplification. The embroidered bodies stand in relief against the bold color; they appear to pulse forward like visible sound, echoing each other from canvas to canvas.
More about Tania Candiani’s translation work
- Tania Candiani
- Listening as a form of resistance: Tania Candiani: where individual voices meet collective activism, and the many words that shape ‘we’., State of Wonder
Conceptual artist Chloë Bass’s work explores daily life as a site of deep research into patterns of intimacy at different scales…
Chloë Bass: Cutting Room Floor #2 (Fethke Family), 2024, Digital video (color, sound); photographic stills on paper;text-based art on paper; installation elements (monitors, furniture, wallpaper).
Dimensions variable.
Sitting in the room, watching contributed family footage didn’t feel voyeuristic, as I thought it would when I learned that it was the family’s home movies. The intimacy inherent in the family sharing it with Bass (everyone must have agreed) is permission to be in the room, and spend time there, as if there vs out here watching. It’s like I am sized to fit into the work.
the primacy of images, the joy of pictures
Chloë Bass: Cutting Room Floor #1 (Carroll Family), 2024, Digital video (color, sound); photographic stills on paper; text-based art on paper; installation elements (monitors, furniture, wallpaper).
Dimensions variable.
…a non-institutionalized curatorial process
More about Chloë Bass’ participatory research
- Chloë Bass
- October Newsletter, Chloë Bass Art Newsletter
Hoda Afshar: In Turn, 2023 Archival pigment prints.
66 x 53 inches each.
The photo series In Turn (2023) was created in response to the feminist uprising that began in Iran in September 2022, following the death of 22yearold Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish name, Jina, who had been arrested by Iran’s morality police for not wearing the hijab properly.
Afshar’s monumental photographs are a testament to collective action and shared grief. The women in the photographs are, like Afshar, Iranian Australians who have watched the protests unfold from afar. Dressed in black, they come together and braid each other’s hair. Their backs turned and their faces hidden, Afshar’s subjects become surrogates for their brave sisters in Iran.
The twines of a braid are referred to in Farsi as pichesh-e-moo, meaning the turn or fold of the hair, symbolizing revolution.
More about Hoda Afshar’s documentary practice
- Hoda Afshar
- How photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth: the fearless work of Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar, The Conversation
Mai Ling: Becoming Stickiness, 2023/2024, Mixed-media two-channel video installation.
Dimensions variable.
“To be given an orientation is to be shaped by the orientation itself”.
Founded in Vienna in 2019, the collective Mai Ling is dedicated to facilitating dialogue on racism, sexism, homophobia, and prejudgment, particularly against FLINT* (women, lesbian, intersex, nonbinary, and trans people) of Asian descent.
Mai Ling investigates the racialized and gendered logic of “ornamentalism” — a term conflating “Orientalism” and “ornamental” coined by American feminist scholar Anne Anlin Cheng to analyze European and American constructions of Asian femininity as hybrid and decorative.
The Orient is the “non-West”
…boundaries mark a distinction
between the Self and the Other
“Such binary thinking destroys diversity”.
Mai Ling challenges such objectification through engagements with ornamental and invasive plants. They confront the decorative aesthetics that perpetuate the sexualization and dehumanization of Asian bodies in white society to reclaim agency.
The sticky kudzu plant plays a central role for Mai Ling in considering “stickiness” as an agent of resistance and pleasure.
Introduced in the U.S. as an “ornamental” plant during an international art exhibition in 1876, the vine is now considered invasive in most of the western world. Native in parts of Asia and the Pacific Islands, kudzu is known as a weaving material and as part of traditional medicine and cuisine.
In the 1970’s, Kudzu was demoted to the status of weed.
…disparaged for “stealing land”
…Becoming Stickiness
…twice now, I’ve sat on a cushion to watch the video and be moved, transformed by - well, you might say, the chorus of ideas: words, movement, visualizations, the soundtrack. beautiful, provocative, hopeful. resonant.
More about Mai Ling’s transformative reclamation work
- Mai Ling
- Not Your Ornament, Contemporary Art Daily