A convergence of time-based pieces will activate La Casa de Todos for a night. Pointing to the kinship between Caribbean ornamental fences and architectural jealousies or latticework—celosías in Spanish— Suspira Es Hacia Adentro, Susurrar Es Hacia Afuera conjures happenings behind celosías’ porous membranes and highlights the “seeing without being seen” that they create. Celosías were used in Roman, Islamic, and subsequently in Western sacred architecture to separate inside from outside in a translucid way: the sun and heat were blocked while the wind could blow; Muslim women could look outside without compromising their modesty; and cloistered nuns attended mass with an unbroken vow to mystical life. The bodily, visual, and discursive poetics of confinement of Kat Bawden, Inés Arango-Guingue, and Vince Phan with the melodics of voluntary reclusion of Beatriz Eugenia Díaz aim to channel the unseen whispers behind Soto’s Caribbean ornaments.
This program is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art, and is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Vince Phan is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. His time-based works focus on the ephemeral beauty in raw and organic materials such as flowers, soils, and compost. He has received multiple fellowships including Eldon Danhausen Fellowship in Sculpture, Abakanowicz’s Graduate Fellowship, and SAIC’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice Graduate Fellowship. He has exhibited his works at Comfort Station, Co-Prosperity, and Untidy Objects at University of Chicago. He’s currently a resident at Chicago Artist Coalition via the HATCH Residency Program.
Beatriz Eugenia Díaz was born in Bogotá in 1965. Her work shifts between music and the visual arts, while passing through the universe of vibrations, words, and numbers. In 1992, she began a career marked by the development of projects to awaken and activate spaces, bodies, or acoustic objects via the creation of a composition system based on mathematics and verbal language. Her work, proposing links, interrelations of language, and connection with nature, has been exhibited in different places around the world.
Kat Bawden (she/they) is an artist, educator, and curator in Chicago whose work explores and mediates relationships between the body, memory, and the self. Working with sensitivity to our physiological connection to light, her photography, video installations, and performances activate viewers’ bodies as a medium for somatic experience and emotional exchange. Kat holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an artist-in-residence with CPS Lives, ISSP, and Prairie Ronde. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Der Grief, Lenscratch, Chicago Reader, and others. She has exhibited and performed at the International Center of Photography, the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Design Museum of Chicago, Iceberg Projects, and others. In 2023 she started MURMURATION, an exhibition space in Chicago.
Inés Arango-Guingue is a Colombian curator and writer whose work centers artists from Latin America and its diasporas. Growing up surrounded by syncretic magical practices, she gravitates towards epistemologies that look away from Western standards of reason and categorization. Her recent research focuses on Caribbean and South American art and philosophy that acknowledge the social power of the unknown, the opaque, and the illegible. She has participated in the organization of exhibitions at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois in Chicago; the Exhibitions Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Mildred’s Lane Complex(ity) in Narrowsburg, New York; Museo del Banco and Flora Ars + Natura in Bogotá, Colombia; and Casona de Linea in La Habana, Cuba, among others. Arango-Guingue was a resident at Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, PA; Lugar A Dudas, Cali, Colombia; and Instituto Superior de las Artes de la Habana, Cuba. She holds a BFA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and an M.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.