Editor’s Word: This story is a part of Newsmakers, a brand new ARTnews sequence the place we interview the movers and shakers who’re making change within the artwork world.
Mexico’s TONO Festival, which focuses on time-based art, opened final week for its third version. Hosted in Mexico City and the close by metropolis of Puebla, the pageant brings collectively 50 artists from 22 international locations to stage video installations, performances, music occasions, and screenings. This 12 months’s pageant unfolds throughout main venues within the space, together with the Museo Anahuacalli, Ex Teresa Arte Precise, and Museo Universitario del Chopo, UNAM, with nightly music programming extending past gallery partitions.
The pageant, which runs till April 6, is the brainchild of Sam Ozer, a curator, author, and producer. Primarily based between Mexico, New York, and Paris, Ozer has held curatorial and programming positions on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, MoMA PS1, and Zona Maco, and arranged tasks at galleries and museum in Athens, Los Angeles, Mexico Metropolis, Milan, and New York.
The 2025 version of TONO expands its worldwide attain, teaming up with MoMA movie curator Sophie Cavoulacos to display quick movies from New York’s Nineteen Eighties artist collectives, in addition to a up to date program with Valentin Noujaïm. TONO has additionally partnered with Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Trendy Artwork Middle to current works from this 12 months’s featured artists in its H BOX gallery. Anticipate new and present works from artists like Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, Saodat Ismailova, Luiz Roque, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, in addition to new commissioned performances by Eartheater and Freeka Tet, amongst others.
ARTnews spoke with Ozer about TONO’s origin story and easy methods to construct an viewers in an artwork world that’s more and more inundated with occasions.
This interview has been edited and condensed for readability and concision.
What was the spark that created TONO?
The venture itself truly grew out of me residing in Mexico Metropolis and dealing as an impartial curator with totally different museums. Loads of the government-funded museums right here in Mexico used to have their very own inside festivals, particularly for sound artwork. Across the early 2000s, authorities funding for the humanities in Mexico turned extra sophisticated and numerous these establishments couldn’t maintain these occasions. On the similar time, I used to be doing this sort of programming and it was clear there was such a starvation for this work within the metropolis. Audiences have been actually eager to show up. So I had this concept for a pageant that related totally different museums within the metropolis, additionally with a public house when it is sensible for a venture.
It was need-based. You noticed the viewers after which introduced the establishments to them.
Precisely. I simply began reaching out to museums saying, “Hey, would you be concerned about collaborating on the sort of programming?” All those I reached out to—the Museo de Arte Moderno, Ex Teresa Arte Precise, which may be very historic for for sound artwork, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, which may be very historic for video artwork—all of them stated sure. By historic, I imply these museums have been discovered within the ’90s and had a wealthy historical past with time-based artwork. The primary version of the TONO pageant had over 30 artists and collectives displaying throughout eight museums and music venues within the metropolis.
Whereas the venture was impressed the pageant format that establishments I’ve labored with earlier than used to have right here in Mexico Metropolis, for me, TONO was at all times about taking a world method to the sort of work and making a construction in which you’ll be able to actually make these tasks occur by pairing totally different establishments inside these international networks. Artists who work with the shifting picture, artists who make sound artwork or efficiency artwork—they typically wrestle to supply their tasks. It’s an awesome assist working with establishments who can assume collaboratively of the way to fund them.
Sam Ozer. Picture by Alberto Bustamante.
Is it troublesome to search out an viewers due to how shut it’s to Zona Maco? Presumably many of the worldwide crowd who got here to Mexico for Maco [which ran in Mexico City from February 5-9] have left.
They’re very several types of tasks. Maco is a business honest. TONO, by way of the the texture of it, is way more just like the Performa Biennial in New York, mixed with Berlin Biennial. We now have video installations and exhibitions throughout museum hours after which, at night time, there are reside efficiency and screenings. The viewers is unquestionably heavy on folks right here in Mexico Metropolis, however we do have folks coming from across the nation like Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Oaxaca Metropolis.
This 12 months truly I’ve like 10 to twenty curators from museums in Los Angeles, Munich, and London which might be coming for analysis. I’m actually enthusiastic about that as a result of the programming of TONO may be very worldwide. There’s positively a give attention to Mexican and Latin American artists. For instance this 12 months we’ve got a serious fee with Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, who’s Mexican, and Jota Mombaça who’s Brazilian. However then we additionally had Arthur Jafa’s first presentation in Latin America within the first version of TONO. Ali Cherri’s first presentation in Mexico was in TONO final 12 months. It’s attention-grabbing for native and worldwide curators to see a majority of these pairings.
Additionally, Mexico is such an attention-grabbing house for the artists to current their work. The structure and museums I work with are so distinctive, which gives artists one thing actually attention-grabbing to play with. Bear in mind, the Joshua Serafin work that went viral on the Venice Biennale, the video through which they have been dancing in that lovely blue form of primordial goo? We confirmed it at TONO a number of months earlier than the Biennale at this wonderful museum in Chapultepec Park, Dolores Cárcamo, and the efficiency occurred in entrance of a mosaic of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water, which was designed by Diego Rivera. So it’s like these wonderful areas that’s actually enjoyable for artists to work with, after which for worldwide audiences, it’s enjoyable for them to see work in a setting with which they’re not so acquainted.
These worldwide relationships that you simply’re constructing require numerous journey. Each for the works that wind up at TONO, but in addition for you personally.
Journey is a number of issues. It’s seeing new artists and seeing the exhibitions they’ve carried out. It’s fundraising, which is an enormous a part of it, after which it’s additionally talking with establishments as a result of I would like as many audiences as potential to have the ability to see the tasks. Final 12 months we co-commissioned Gabriel Massan: Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak, with the Serpentine, which first confirmed in London, then got here to Mexico, after which went to Brazil. Then, this 12 months, two of the performances are co-commissioned with museums in Europe: Jota Mombaça’s wonderful new efficiency was co-produced with Wiels and can later tour Brussels. And a fee of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, co-produced with MUDAM, will tour Luxembourg in late spring. It’s essential to be obtainable. Following up with folks in particular person remains to be simply so essential, no matter how a lot we’ve got grown used to utilizing Zoom and WhatsApp. Face-to-face is simply nonetheless so essential, as is knowing how a present feels in an area for what it could actually imply for a selected work.
What do you see for TONO’s future?
A giant a part of TONO is collaborating with bigger establishments, and I’d prefer to assume we’ve been pushing different museums to embrace that technique of working. So many establishments are financially struggling, whether or not it’s non-public donors being extra cautious with how they’re allocating their funds … or governments altering their plans. I actually imagine that co-commissioning a chunk, for each establishment, means not solely that you simply’re sharing the prices but in addition enabling a wider viewers to see it. Isn’t that what we’re all making an attempt to do?
