Cantando Bajito: Chorus

Curated by Roxana Fabius, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes

Translated into English as “singing softly,” the exhibition series title is drawn from a phrase used by Dora María Téllez Argüello, a now-liberated Nicaraguan political prisoner, to describe the singing exercises she did while she was incarcerated in isolation. Helping her to conserve her voice and defeat the political terror she endured, Téllez’s quiet singing became a powerful strategy for survival and resistance. Conceived in three movements, Cantando Bajito features artists who explore similar forms of creative resistance in the wake of widespread gender-based violence.

Cantando Bajito: Chorus, the third and final movement in the exhibition series is an invitation to reflect on the importance of collective making, organizing, and care arising from interdependence in shared struggles. The works illuminate how the coming together of bodies forges power out of precarity. 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.

With special thanks to members of the Cantando Bajito curatorial advisory group: Isis Awad, María Carri, Zasha Colah, Maria Catarina Duncan, Kobe Ko, Marie Hélène Pereira. 

Image courtesy of Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina).

About the Curators

Roxana Fabius

Roxana Fabius is a Uruguayan curator and art administrator based in New York City. Between 2016 and 2022 she was Executive Director at A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-run feminist cooperative space in the U.S. During her tenure at A.I.R. she organized programs and exhibitions with artists and thinkers such as Gordon Hall, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jack Halberstam, Che Gosset, Regina José Galindo, Lex Brown, Kazuko, Zarina, Mindy Seu, Naama Tzabar, and Howardena Pindell among many others. These exhibitions, programs and special commissions were made in collaboration with international institutions such as the Whitney Museum, Google Arts and Culture, The Feminist Institute, and Frieze Art Fair in New York and London. Fabius has served as an adjunct professor for the Curatorial Practices seminar at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Tel Aviv University. She has also taught at Parsons at The New School, City University of New York, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University. She is currently curating the 2024 exhibition series Cantando Bajito at the Ford Foundation Gallery.

Beya Othmani

Beya Othmani is an art curator and researcher from Algeria and Tunisia, dividing her time between Tunis and New York. Currently, she is the C-MAP Africa Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Her recent curatorial projects include the three-part exhibition series Cantando Bajito at the Ford Foundation Gallery, the Ljubljana 35th Graphic Arts Biennial, and Publishing Practices #2 at Archive Berlin. Previously, she took part in the curatorial teams of various projects with sonsbeek20→24 (2020), the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale (2019), and the Dak’Art 13 Biennial (2018), among others, and was a curatorial assistant at the Berlin-based art space SAVVY Contemporary. Some of her latest curatorial projects explored radical feminist publishing practices, post-colonial histories of print-making, and the construction of racial identities in art in colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Mindy Seu

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Vanity Fair, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.

Susana Vargas Cervantes

Susana Vargas Cervantes teaches, writes, and curates. Vargas Cervantes is a transdisciplinary scholar, internationally recognized for her artistic and academic work at the intersections of alternative criminology, visual studies, and queer studies—in both Anglo North America and Latin America. Her research mines the connections between gender, sexuality, class, and skin tonalities to reconceptualize pigmentocracy as a system of perception. She is the author of the book The Little Old Lady Killer: The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexico’s First Female Serial Killer (NYU Press, 2019) and Mujercitos (Editorial RM, 2015). After a Fulbright Visiting Fellowship at Columbia University, she joined Carleton University as an Assistant Professor in Communication and Media Studies.