{"id":275651,"date":"2026-05-01T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/sinara-rozo-perdomo-what-it-takes-to-live\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T12:48:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T17:48:29","slug":"sinara-rozo-perdomo-what-it-takes-to-live","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/sinara-rozo-perdomo-what-it-takes-to-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Sinara Rozo-Perdomo<\/br>What It Takes To Live<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In her recent exhibition, What It Takes To Live<\/em>, 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<\/em> with<\/em> rather than overcoming. From the outset, Rozo-Perdomo situated the viewer inside a temporal register shaped by Canadian medical bureaucracy, care, and refusal.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The exhibition opened with a journey poem read against the grain of a medical prescription. The lettering recalled the typography of a physician\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a readymade installation composed of two rows of yellow and green plastic medicine containers, the viewer confronted a visual index of suffering. Each bottle bore the generic name of a molecule prescribed to treat a specific ailment, and cascading lists of side effects hung below like bureaucratic scrolls. Publicly displayed, these strips of paper revealed the opaque medical histories of Rozo-Perdomo\u2019s illness with unsettling elegance. The soft lighting and domestic, shelf-like plinths heightened the uncanniness of the work: from a distance, they resembled tasteful home d\u00e9cor, yet the horizontal display of symptoms read as a slow-unfolding horror story. What emerged was a macabre cabinet of curiosities chronicling the artist\u2019s trial by fire through disability. At the same time, the installation exposed the shadowy logic of medical bureaucracy, which abstracts the patient\u2019s suffering into containers, labels, and codes. The body disappears; only its pharmacological trace remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\"Sinara
Sinara Rozo-Perdomo
<\/strong>What It Takes To Live<\/em>, exhibition views, A Space Gallery, 
Toronto, 2025.
Photo: Selina Whittaker, courtesy of the artist & 
A Space Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This logic of accumulation continued in another readymade sculptural installation, in which Rozo-Perdomo displayed the hospital wristbands that she wore during dialysis treatment. Arranged in parallel rows that recall the ruled lines of a notebook, the tags transformed administrative residue into mnemonic evidence of her s\u00e9jour within institutional care. The materiality of each tag\u200a\u2014\u200asome creased and worn, others more intact\u200a\u2014\u200aregistered a haptic relationship with the skin of the wrist, which became a proxy for the body\u2019s archive. The repetition of coded information points to Rozo-Perdomo\u2019s circulation through the bureaucratic healthcare system, a process that fragments, standardizes, and commodifies the body. Read as a durational record rather than a linear narrative, the accumulation of tags materialized crip time: marked not by recovery or resolution but by repetition, waiting, and endurance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"Sinara
Sinara Rozo-Perdomo
<\/strong>What It Takes To Live<\/em>, exhibition views, A Space Gallery, 
Toronto, 2025.
Photo: Selina Whittaker, courtesy of the artist & 
A Space Gallery, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Across the exhibition, Rozo-Perdomo refused both tragedy and inspiration as interpretive frameworks. What It Takes To Live<\/em> offered instead a politics of softness, one that honours messiness, care, and refusal as modes of survival. By rendering medical systems visible through their residues, Rozo-Perdomo insisted on the lived weight of institutional time, asking not what it means to get better but what it takes to keep living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Space Gallery,<\/strong> Toronto<\/br>September 19\u200a\u2013November 8, 2025<\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":6506,"featured_media":275630,"template":"","categories":[884],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7420],"artistes":[8092],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-275651","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-marco-antonio-giovanetti-en","artistes-sinara-rozo-perdomo-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/275651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275651"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=275651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}