ABOUT

For Mexico City’s Art Week, KUBORAUM and TONO co-curate a special evening this Friday, February 7, at the KUBORAUM INNERRAUM MEXICO CITY GALLERY at Colima 112.

Beginning at 6 PM, the gallery will be activated with live performances by Guatemalan-born, Mexico City–based cellist and experimental musician Mabe Fratti alongside British, Berlin-based cellist, composer, and curator Lucy Railton. For the first time, the two artists will present a collaborative live performance conceived במיוחד for this occasion.

Mexican Jihad, co-founder of N.A.A.F.I. and a key figure in Mexico’s underground electronic scene, will open and close the evening with a DJ set.

Henrot, much like Bo Bardi, offers an articulation between the personal/domestic and the global, addressing questions of pleasure and freedom. For Bo Bardi, culture was inherently tied to questions of society and leisure. She crafted communal spaces, sites for gathering and for art, and gave “leisure a cultural, didactic and playful dimension.” When asked “what comes first, houses or museums?,” she replied that “all should come at once.” Henrot’s work, too, captures this complexity and the contemporary “all at once” feeling catalyzed by technology surrounding us in today’s world.

This exhibition revisits two of Henrot’s works–Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers? (2011-) and Grosse Fatigue (2013). The first is a series of ikebana arrangements, each representing a book from Henrot’s library translated into organic form, and the latter is Henrot’s video work which won her the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Henrot will also be making a new ikebana inspired by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel Água Viva (1973).

Curated by Sophie de Mello and Samantha Ozer, the exhibition is a co-production of Orfeo 0112 and TONO, in collaboration with Instituto Bardi. This project is organized on the occasion of the 2025 France–Brazil Cultural Season.

The exhibition will be open from December 17–20, 2025, and January 8–31, 2026, with visiting hours daily from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM.

Admission is free.

OFFSCREEN and TONO present a special evening at Chapelle Saint-Louis.

Guatemalan-born, Mexico City–based cellist Mabe Fratti and British cellist, composer, and curator Lucy Railton come together for their first collaborative performance in Europe, following an initial encounter organized by TONO in Mexico City.

CRYSTALLMESS & Guests is a one-night-only event on the occasion of Christelle Oyiri’s installation Dead God Flow at CANK, Neukölln. The artist also works as a DJ and producer under the pseudonym CRYSTALLMESS.

Expanding beyond the exhibited videos, which explore rap music, she curates an evening featuring friends and legends across electronic music styles, from Chicago footwork to dub techno and ambient synth. The night will unfold between live performances and DJ sets by Space Afrika, RP Boo, SUUTOO and CRYSTALLMESS herself.

Photo: Jacopo La Forgia

For the third edition of TONO Festival, TONO and CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian are collaborating on a screening program for the H BOX. The collection includes videos by select TONO 2025 artists, with some projects simultaneously screened between Mexico City and Lisbon, harnessing the potential of video artwork to be shared widely and to connect audiences between these geographies. The program includes works by an international group of artists from Argentina, Brazil, France, Lebanon, Mexico, Spain, Thailand, and Uzbekistan.

Program:

Korakrit Arunanondchai — Songs for living, 2021

Paloma Contreras Lomas — Virgilio, 2025

Carolina Fusilier — Mercurial Currents, 2023

Saodat Ismailova — Chillpiq, 2016

Jota Mombaça — Until the last morning, 2023

Valentin Noujaïm — Pacific Club, 2023

Luiz Roque — Clube Amarelo, 2024

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané — Drench, 2024

Image: Saodat Ismailova — Chillpiq, 2016

La Culebra (55’) was a live performance conceived by WangShui and Alberto Bustamante as a closing ritual for the Biennale Arte 2024. Set within WangShui’s chamber-like installation, which featured their Cathexis paintings exploring the serpent as a cipher for knowledge, violence, and love, the performance echoed the story of the Tlaloc monolith. La Bruja de Texcoco embodied the serpent, her voice moving fluidly through Indigenous Mexican music traditions, orchestral choruses, and contemporary club sounds, weaving time and space with the frequency of love.

Co-produced by TONO and La Biennale di Venezia, with the support of Kuboraum

Performer: La Bruja de Texcoco

Music: Lauro Robles, Alberto Bustamante, and La Bruja de Texcoco

The performance opened with a ceremonial prelude by Little Owl and Debit

Costumes: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane

Photo credit: Clelia Cadamuro

Read more in La Biennale di Venezia, Nasty Magazine, Document Journal,  Purple Magazine.

TONO and Kuboraum hosted an after party to celebrate the world premiere a La Culebra (55’), a live performance conceived by WangShui and Alberto Bustamante as a closing ritual for the Biennale Arte 2024. Following the final performance in the arsenale of the Biennale, guests were invited to continue the festivities at COMBO Venice. There were DJ sets by Mexican Jihad, LAO, and Debit, with drinks by Yola Mezcal.

Photo credit: Clelia Cadamuro

TONO x PAMMTV Selects was a program of shapeshifting video art which screened across Mexico City, South Florida, and PAMMTV. TONO x PAMMTV Selects premiered during the 2024 TONO festival in Mexico City with a screening at the Centro de Cultura Digital on March 13th. Works were subsequently presented in the PAMM auditorium and online on PAMMTV.

The twelve works featured in this program explored how bodies transform across virtual, natural, and supernatural worlds. From the atomic to the cosmic and the cell to the pixel, the videos in TONO x PAMMTV Selects explored processes of metamorphosis. Spanning creatures constructed out of mud and bodies transformed through science, to digital avatars and bodies manipulated through rituals, the figures in these videos burst a discrete definition of a body. Here, bodies are material vessels as much as they are objects for imagination and groups. A body, from a river to a digital stream, is constantly in a state of flux.

Participating artists included Biarritzzz, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Seba Calfuqueo, Leo Castañeda, Cristóbal Cea, Colectivo Ixqcrear, Edny Jean Joseph, (La)Horde, Carlos Motta, Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau, Agnes Questionmark, and Tania Ximena.

Read more in Hyperallergic

Casa Dragones invited TONO to curate a performance program for Mexico Week at Rockefeller Center. TONO subsequently commissioned Mexican choreographer Diego Vega Solorza to imagine a new dance piece. Performed by Pascale Ussel and Carla Segovia, “Las Olas” was an exercise on time and stillness, where the body narrated the mystical and historical relationship between humans and the tide.

Choreography: Diego Vega Solorza

Music: Sebastián Lechuga

Dancers: Carla Segovia y Pascale Ussel

Costumes: Mauricio Ascencio

Watch & Chill was a hybrid video art exhibition created by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul (MMCA) to explore the hierarchies between online experience and physical exhibition. TONO’s participation in season three with institutions in the Americas and Oceania followed the success of season one, which included collaborations with Asian museums (Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in Manila, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, and the M+, West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong) and season two, which brought in partnerships with Middle Eastern and European art institutions (ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and Sharjah Art Foundation).

For Season III, TONO collaborated with the MMCA, The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (PEM); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (NGV) on a program that travelled between all venues and was simultaneously streamed on the MMCA’s Watch & Chill streaming platform. Artists included Meriem Bennani, Pia Borg, Club Ate (Justin Shoulder, Bhenji Ra), Fyerool Darma, FHHH friends (Han Seungjae, Han Yangkyu, Yoon Hanjin), Cécile B. Evans, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Chitra Ganesh, Nic Hamilton, Kwon Hayoun, Jang Minseung, Jung Jaekyung, siren eun young jung, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Liang Luscombe, Garush Melkonyan, Alison Nguyen, Park Chan-kyong, Luiz Roque, Jacolby Satterwhite, Skawennati, Lior Shamriz, Song Sanghee, Karina Utomo and Cūrā8.

More info here.

Photo credit: Cheolki Hong