Sinara Rozo-Perdomo: What It Takes To Live

Sinara Rozo-Perdomo, What It Takes to Live, Video Still, 2025

What It Takes To Live
Sinara Rozo-Perdomo

September 19 – October 25, 2025
Opening Reception: September 19, 7 – 9pm
Artist Talk: October 25, 2 – 4pm
A Space Gallery, Toronto

What It Takes To Live is a visceral meditation on illness, embodiment, and the precarious balance between pain and pleasure that defines chronic survival. Rooted in Sinara Rozo-Perdomo’s lived experience of kidney failure, hospitalization, and the daily negotiations of disability, the work transforms the medicalized body into a choreographic site where tenderness and rage meet, where stillness itself becomes resistance, and where every breath is a declaration of endurance. This is not a story of overcoming but of becoming: through collapse, through care, through refusal. Drawing from disability justice frameworks, diasporic memory, and experimental moving image, the piece resists linear narratives and refuses to frame illness as either tragedy or inspiration. Instead, it honours the messiness of survival and the radical softness that can emerge when we stop apologizing for our pain.

At the same time, What It Takes To Live confronts the social realities that shape this survival: the cost of care, the weight of motherhood under systemic neglect, and the invisibility of disabled lives within structures that withhold support. Living on ODSP, Ontario’s disability program, means making impossible choices between food, medicine, and dignity, while raising two teenagers alone within a system designed to punish need. Through experimental visuals, sonic textures, and breathwork, the work embodies the loneliness of being unseen, the exhaustion of caregiving without relief, and the quiet grief of persistence in a society that offers just enough to keep you alive, but never enough to let you live. This piece is not a triumphal arc but a mirror: an invitation to witness the radical endurance it takes to remain present, to keep breathing, to keep moving—even when the world would rather you disappear.

This solo exhibition exemplifies Sinara Rozo-Perdomo’s care-based practice and decolonial methodology. She seeks to reframe how stories of illness, migration, and survival are held and shared. In doing so, her work challenges dominant narratives while foregrounding the multiplicity of Latinx and disabled experiences. Sinara’s projects resist easy categorization, unfolding as layered conversations between the body, technology, and memory. Her commitment extends beyond her own work to cultivating visibility and critical dialogue for marginalized artists within the Latinx diaspora in Canada. At its core, her practice asks how media arts can hold space for care, resilience, and transformation in the face of systemic inequities.

Biography

Sinara Rozo-Perdomo is a Toronto-based media artist and curator whose interdisciplinary practice weaves together lived experience, memory, and experimental form. Her work emerges from personal encounters with disability, medical neglect, and motherhood, transforming these intimate narratives into poetic explorations of resilience, embodiment, and care. Through multi-channel video, sound, and material fragments drawn from the body and everyday life, she creates installations that invite audiences to witness vulnerability as a space of strength and resistance.

About A Space Gallery

A Space Gallery is one of the oldest artist run centres in Canada and has had a significant role in the evolution of contemporary art in Canada. A Space began as an alternative commercial gallery three years before the centre’s not-for-profit incorporation in January 1971. Today, A Space Gallery is committed to critical engagement through the presentation of interdisciplinary programs including exhibitions, performances, screenings, collaborations, and discussions. Central to the gallery’s artistic direction is an exploration of the ways that art can contribute to social justice and to greater awareness of cultural similarities, differences and specificities. We are open to local and international proposals from individual artists as well as curatorial propositions, thematic interests, and research trajectories. A Space brings together artists, curators, writers, academics, students and activists whose works transgress disciplinary boundaries.

A Space Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 110
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
416.979.9633
www.aspacegallery.org

Public Hours
Tuesday to Friday | 11am to 5pm
Saturday | Noon to 5pm
Admission is free

Accessibility
Our venue is has some accessibility features, with automatic door openers to enter the building (not for the gallery and exhibition space). An accessible washroom is available.

A Space Gallery acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.