Aruna D’Souza
In the final show of a three-part exhibition cycle, the power of solidarity and communal resistance is manifested in works by
collectives around the world.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured, center foreground: Archivo Memoria Trans México / Hospital de Ropa (Trans Memory Archive Mexico / Clothing Hospital), Scream Dress‚ Superperra (Oswaldo Calderón, Mexico City, 1973–February 14, 2020), 2022. Far right: Textiles Semillas (Textiles as Seeds), El tejido mensaje-aliento-pensamiento-resistencia (The weaving message-breath-thought-resistance), 2024.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, curated by Roxana Fabius, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes, Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East Forty-Third Street, New York City, through December 7, 2024
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The title of the three-part exhibition cycle Cantando Bajito (Singing Softly)—whose final iteration is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery until December 7—is drawn from the story of Dora María Téllez Argüello, a Nicaraguan political activist. During the two years she was imprisoned in solitary confinement, she quietly sang to herself to both preserve her voice and sustain her spirit. Inspired by this gesture of defiance, the curators of the shows counterpose the physical and political violence to which feminized bodies around the world are subject with the work of artists, activists, and collectives who find power in vulnerability. To focus on vulnerability, paradoxically, moves the feminist conversation away from “women as victims” (a strategy often keyed to inspiring empathy in the viewer) and toward something much more bracing: “When bodies protesting together in the streets show the power of their vulnerability before state violence,” the curators write in the exhibition brochure, “we see that it is in vulnerability itself that resistance is found.”
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach.
The organizational model for the project is decidedly collaborative: an international roster of six guest curators and four advisory group members conceived the conceptual terms, and each iteration was organized by a different combination of people. (Roxana Fabius and Beya Othmani were part of every team.) The structure allows for a sense of the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggle, while offering insight into the particularities of peoples’ local conditions. Part one of Cantando Bajito, “Testimonies,” highlighted art addressing the act of bearing witness and art’s role in carrying on the political memory of feminized bodies. (The curatorial group has chosen to refer to “feminized bodies” in the exhibition series to allow for a fulsome understanding of gender expression and as a nod toward a decolonial feminist theory that understands all bodies can potentially be feminized—targeted for oppression and possession—by the colonizing logic of patriarchy.) Part two, “Incantations,” focused on practices that speak to networks of knowledge transmission, historical and contemporary, that have enabled those subject to gender-based violence to survive and support each other, including through the creation of secret languages and gossip. Now, with part three, “Chorus,” the curators present art that underscores the communal nature of political struggle, likening it to a choir in which disparate voices come together to create something bigger than any individual enunciation.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured: Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentine (Trans Memory Archive Argentina), Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes), 2024.
Given the theme, it’s not surprising that collectives are highlighted here. The show opens, in the lobby just outside the gallery’s glass doors, with a 2024 installation by Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina) titled Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes). Framed photographs of trans women posing for the camera (selected from a collection amassed starting in the 1990s that also includes film, newspaper clippings, IDs, passports, police files, personal diaries, and so on) sit atop a white grand piano accessorized with a faux fur–covered bench. In this glam but homey setting, they become at once a family tree and a historical document, a record of private moments and a resistance to violent erasure by the state. The collective’s model has inspired activists in other countries—including the Archivo Memoria Trans México / Hospital de Ropa (Trans Memory Archive Mexico / Clothing Hospital), represented by two works inside the galleries. Gabriela Martell (Durango, c. 1959–Mexico City, November 20, 2001) and Scream Dress — Superperra (Oswaldo Calderón, Mexico City, 1973–February 14, 2020), both from 2022, are part of a larger series of garments the Mexican collective makes from clothing belonging to members of the trans and gender-nonconforming community who have died of AIDS-related causes.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured, left: Archivo Memoria Trans México / Hospital de Ropa (Trans Memory Archive Mexico / Clothing Hospital), Gabriela Martell (Durango, c. 1959–Mexico City, November 20, 2001), 2022. Far right: Textiles Semillas (Textiles as Seeds), El tejido mensaje-aliento-pensamiento-resistencia (The weaving message-breath-thought-resistance), 2024.
The work of the Trans Memory Archive collectives is activism, archiving, memory-keeping, and artmaking at once, as is the piece offered by Textiles Semillas (Textiles as Seeds). This Argentine group focuses on reclaiming weaving as a form of Indigenous knowledge that has been threatened by the epistemological violence of colonialism. El tejido mensaje-aliento-pensamiento-resistencia (The weaving message-breath-thought-resistance) (2024) is comprised of a range of textiles crafted from traditional and modern materials (llama fiber, sheep’s wool, chaguar fiber, cotton, industrial yarns) and colored with natural dyes, draped over a delicate metal frame or attached to it, as if still on a loom. In the back of the gallery is “The Collective Desk,” where we find a treasure trove of materials, including those preserved by the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive related to Asian American and Pacific Islander sex workers (a project that developed in the wake of a mass shooting in Atlanta), as well as others from FAQ?, a queer feminist group from Tokyo, and the US-based Cyberfeminism Index, founded by Mindy Seu. The latter’s offerings include a 3D-printed speculum by GynePunk, a group of biohackers seeking to “decolonize gynecology.” (Fuck yeah.)
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured: Tania Candiani, from Manifestantes (Protesters) series, 2022–24.
The emphasis on public and collective action continues with striking contributions by the Mexico City–based Tania Candiani and the Iranian-born, Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar. Three canvases from Candiani’s Manifestantes (Protesters) series (2022–24) consist of delicately sewn line drawings on red-painted surfaces of larger-than-life figures based on photos of women’s rights demonstrators in Kabul, Argentina, and Mexico. Afshar’s four-part In Turn (2023) is also based on photographs, this time of Kurdish women freedom fighters braiding their hair before heading into battle against Iranian forces. It was the murder of a Kurdish woman by morality police for taking off her hijab that sparked the feminist uprising in Iran two years ago, and the movement’s slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom,” was borrowed from Kurdish feminists—an instance of solidarity that crossed other ideological divides. In Afshar’s photos, members of the Iranian diaspora in Australia replicate poses from the source images, an action that is as intimate as it is defiant, filled with longing and camaraderie.
Cantando Bajito: Chorus, installation view. Courtesy Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured, left: Chloë Bass, Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018–24 (detail). Center, on wall: Hoda Afshar, In Turn, 2023. Far right, foreground: Archivo Memoria Trans México / Hospital de Ropa (Trans Memory Archive Mexico / Clothing Hospital), Scream Dress‚ Superperra (Oswaldo Calderón, Mexico City, 1973–February 14, 2020), 2022.
The question of intimacy comes to the fore in Chloë Bass’s three videos, part of her project Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018–24). (The artist is a longtime interlocutor of mine, but this is the first time I’ve encountered this work.) Bass, who is mixed race, asked mixed-race families around the US to film themselves at home. She then turned the footage into short videos that are displayed in corners of the gallery, which have been transformed into living rooms: old cathode-ray-tube televisions on coffee tables are set against floral wallpapered walls hung with framed photographs. Intercut with the families’ conversations, Bass’s voice-over draws on the writings of Lauren Berlant and bell hooks, gently persuading us to recognize the ways in which, even in the most loving relationships, we are always seeing each other across chasms of difference. For Bass, that chasm is not a problem to be solved or a fact to be either lamented or celebrated (as in the hard-to-shake tendency to see mixed-race families as correctives to society’s racial divisions)—it is merely a fact of life, and American life in particular. By showing us moments of connection and dissonance—the tender frictions—that occur in these domestic spheres, she points out the ways in which the family functions as one of our earliest experiences of solidarity-building, a site that offers the possibility of finding common purpose. At the same time, she reminds us, they are spaces that “absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere.” In other words: collectives, from the tightly knit space of the family or the decentralized one of a global network, both protect us from and expose us to the world. The forms of solidarity they engender are, as Bass’s work and Cantando Bajito: Chorus as a whole demonstrate, both vital and necessary—and, perhaps, vulnerable and imperfect too. And therein lies their power.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press this summer.