Majority Rule: Myth-making practices and survival strategies from the Global South
Sanman Studios in Houston, Texas
Opening reception: April 30, 2023
Exhibition Dates: April 30-May 21, 2023

1109 Providence St, Houston, TX 77002
gallery hours (Wed-Sun | 11am -7pm)

For Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month (AAPI), artists, community organizers, writers, dancers, chefs, and musicians will activate Sanman Studios’ gallery space with practices of gathering, knowledge-sharing, and cultural participation through public activations and a visual arts exhibition. 

Locating the estuaries, bayous, and swamplands of Houston as spaces of hybrid climates, biodiversity, and cultural plurality, we look toward majority-initiated survival to imagine a future for ourselves. Majority Rule  is an invocation of community-building through a variety of mediums–the exhibition space, the dinner table, the artist workshop, and the conversation between friends and strangers–as a way to speculate beyond individualism, scarcity, and catastrophe towards conviviality, communality, and connectedness. 

This exhibition presents artistic work located in the survival of cultural minorities in the Global North as a gesture of global majoritarianism by proposing ways of  “looking south” as a method of resistance to hegemonic solutions driven by white minority perspectives and western discourse. Ranging from rapidly dissolving coastlines to tropical paradises, the artists and communities along seacoasts, archipelagos, and oceanic geographies have sustained and preserved ways of coming together even amidst displacement, diaspora, and migration.

Majority Rule theorizes on warm-weather solidarities, humid climates, and tropical futures within the practices of South and Southeast Asian artists in Houston. The works by Houston-based South and Southeast Asian artists preserve and elevate artistic practices located within and along social, political, and geographic peripheries. The exhibition brings together artistic and cultural practices with south-south connections to consider the relationships and reorientations among the U.S. South/Global South and South Asia/Southeast Asia. 

The exhibition is curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum @erikameichua

Artists:
Leticia Bajuyo @lbajuyo
Brandon Tho Harris @brandonthoharris
Kill Joy @kill.joy.land
Matt Manalo @mattmanalo
Ruhee Maknojia @ruheemaknojia
Anthony Pabillano @anthonypabillano
Jagdeep Raina
Sajeela Siddiq @sajeela_siddiq_art

I am honored that my sculptures Forces of Nature: Blue Skies, Slinkys, and Hurricanes will on display in this group exhibition.

These unusual benches surrounded by ripples of artificial grass with calm grassy centers at the eye of each storm were inspired by diagrams of hurricane development and the spring movement of the “wonderful toy” Slinky (as the longest-running jingle in advertising history so memorably describes it), this sculptural installation features two sculptures that appear to be large Slinkys connected at the ends into rings.  Reminiscent of inner tubes easing down a lazy river or bean bags in a living room, these sculptures offer an awkward nexus between weather forecasting drama and modest moments of play with a manufactured peaceful yet artificial, grassy eye of the storm.