Cantando Bajito: Incantations

Curated by Roxana Fabius, Kobe Ko, and Beya Othmani

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. 

The second chapter, Cantando Bajito: Incantations, brings together artists who consider ancestral, contemporary, and future-facing networks of support and care that safeguard feminized bodies through forms of knowledge transmission. 

Such networks—symbolic systems, subversive spaces, or covert forms of language—are as varied as the communities that develop them. They include Nüshu, a form of script passed from mother to daughter in China; the use of henna as an agent of protection; and forms of therapeutic communication that have been deemed “gossip.” All have long existed, whether in the shadows or in plain sight. Preserved not in written history but in the body, these channels prepare feminized bodies for potential violence while giving them tools to resist it. 

With special thanks to members of the Cantando Bajito curatorial advisory group: Isis Awad, María Carri, Zasha Colah, Maria Catarina Duncan, Marie Hélène Pereira, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes.

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.

Kobe Ko

Kobe Ko is an independent curator and artist, and formerly worked as Assistant Curator at Para Site, Hong Kong (2021–2023) and Art Education and Gallery Coordinator at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019–2021). She has curated Everyday Life in Hong Kong and Fukuoka: The Study of Contemporary Arts and Kougengaku’(art space tetra, Fukuoka, 2023), Post-Human Narratives’series (Cattle Depot Artist Village and Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, Hong Kong, 2020–2022), Kong Chun Hei’s solo exhibition PS (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2023), Florence Yuk-ki Lee’s solo exhibition Broken heart pieces disco ball (MOU PROJECTS, Hong Kong, 2023), and CHOW KAI CHIN Community Art Experimental Project (Kowloon City, Hong Kong, 2013 & 2014), among others.

Ko’s artworks depart from her intimate relationships and personal sensation and mainly focus on the re-imagination of distance and boundaries. She has participated in joint exhibition The Tailed Scar (Tiger A(r)m Strong Biennale, Hong Kong, 2023), duo exhibition Over the ocean, over the sea (Current Plans, Hong Kong, 2022) and more. She graduated from the Department of Creative Arts and Culture of the Hong Kong University of Education, and received an MA in Gender Studies from Shih Hsin University in Taiwan. She lives and works in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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 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.