Majority Rule, 2023

Majority Rule is a group exhibition of artist featuring work from Leticia Bajuyo, Brandon Tho Harris, Kill Joy, Matt Manalo, Ruhee Maknojia, Anthony Pabillano, Jagdeep Raina, and Sajeela Siddiq curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum at Sanman Studios.

The Exhibition draws on storytelling, myth-making, and survival strategies of South and Southeast Asian artists in Houston to consider forms of connected knowledge in the Global South, such as warm-weather solidarities, humid climates, and tropical futures as a way to preserve and elevate artistic practices located within and along cultural political, and geographic peripheries. Ranging from rapidly dissolving coastlines to tropical paradieses, the artists and communities along seacoasts, archipelagos, and oceanic geographies have sustained and preserved ways of coming together even amidst displacement, diaspora, and migration. Throughout the show, the artworks and activations propose “looking south” as a method of resistance to hegemonic solutions driven by perspectives from the global north.

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.