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.”
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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.
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Read full review at 4columns.org.
