Sinara Rozo-Perdomo
What It Takes To Live

In her recent exhibition, What It Takes To Live, Sinara Rozo-Perdomo rejected the redemptive arc so often imposed on narratives of illness. Rather than framing survival as triumph, the exhibition unfolded as an accumulation: of hours, prescriptions, tags, pauses, and returns. It was about duration rather than resolution, about living with rather than overcoming. From the outset, Rozo-Perdomo situated the viewer inside a temporal register shaped by Canadian medical bureaucracy, care, and refusal.

The exhibition opened with a journey poem read against the grain of a medical prescription. The lettering recalled the typography of a physician’s note, collapsing the distance between lyric voice and clinical authority. Time appeared first as data: 6,984 hours, 291 days, or nine months and eighteen days. These measurements operated as a cold reminder of the slow compartmentalization of lived experience under medical regimes. What might otherwise register as recovery time became instead a durational record of waiting, monitoring, and administrative endurance.