TONO founder Sam Ozer of the importance of Collaboration and Time-based Art

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

Mexico’s TONO Festival, which focuses on time-based art, opened last week for its third edition. Hosted in Mexico City and the nearby city of Puebla, the festival brings together 50 artists from 22 countries to stage video installations, performances, music events, and screenings. This year’s festival unfolds across major venues in the area, including the Museo Anahuacalli, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, and Museo Universitario del Chopo, UNAM, with nightly music programming extending beyond gallery walls.

The festival, which runs until April 6, is the brainchild of Sam Ozer, a curator, writer, and producer. Based between Mexico, New York, and Paris, Ozer has held curatorial and programming positions at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and Zona Maco, and organized projects at galleries and museum in Athens, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Milan, and New York. 

The 2025 edition of TONO expands its international reach, teaming up with MoMA film curator Sophie Cavoulacos to screen short films from New York’s 1980s artist collectives, as well as a contemporary program with Valentin Noujaïm. TONO has also partnered with Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Modern Art Center to present works from this year’s featured artists in its H BOX gallery. Expect new and existing works from artists like Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, Saodat Ismailova, Luiz Roque, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, as well as new commissioned performances by Eartheater and Freeka Tet, among others.

ARTnews spoke with Ozer about TONO’s origin story and how to build an audience in an art world that is increasingly inundated with events. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

What was the spark that created TONO? 

The project itself actually grew out of me living in Mexico City and working as an independent curator with different museums. A lot of the government-funded museums here in Mexico used to have their own internal festivals, specifically for sound art. Around the early 2000s, government funding for the arts in Mexico became more complicated and a lot of these institutions couldn’t hold these events. At the same time, I was doing this kind of programming and it was clear there was such a hunger for this work in the city. Audiences were really keen to turn up. So I had this idea for a festival that connected different museums in the city, also with a public space when it makes sense for a project. 

It was need-based. You saw the audience and then brought the institutions to them.

Exactly. I just started reaching out to museums saying, “Hey, would you be interested in collaborating on this type of programming?” All the ones I reached out to—the Museo de Arte Moderno,  Ex Teresa Arte Actual, which is very historic for for sound art, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, which is very historic for video art—they all said yes. By historic, I mean these museums were found in the ’90s and had a rich history with time-based art. The first edition of the TONO festival had over 30 artists and collectives showing across eight museums and music venues in the city. 

While the project was inspired the festival format that institutions I’ve worked with before used to have here in Mexico City, for me, TONO was always about taking a global approach to this type of work and creating a structure in which you can really make these projects happen by pairing different institutions within these global networks. Artists who work with the moving image, artists who make sound art or performance art—they often struggle to produce their projects. It’s a great help working with institutions who can think collaboratively of ways to fund them.

Is it difficult to find an audience because of how close it is to Zona Maco? Presumably most of the international crowd who came to Mexico for Maco [which ran in Mexico City from February 5-9] have left.

They are very different types of projects. Maco is a commercial fair. TONO, in terms of the the feel of it, is much more like the Performa Biennial in New York, combined with Berlin Biennial. We have video installations and exhibitions during museum hours and then, at night, there are live performance and screenings. The audience is definitely heavy on people here in Mexico City, but we do have people coming from around the country like Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Oaxaca City.

This year actually I have like 10 to 20 curators from museums in Los Angeles, Munich, and London that are coming for research. I’m really excited about that because the programming of TONO is very international. There’s definitely a focus on Mexican and Latin American artists. For example this year we have a major commission with Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, who’s Mexican, and Jota Mombaça who’s Brazilian. But then we also had Arthur Jafa’s first presentation in Latin America in the first edition of TONO. Ali Cherri’s first presentation in Mexico was in TONO last year. It’s interesting for local and international curators to see these types of pairings. 

Also, Mexico is such an interesting space for the artists to present their work. The architecture and museums I work with are so unique, which offers artists something really interesting to play with. Remember, the Joshua Serafin work that went viral at the Venice Biennale, the video in which they were dancing in that beautiful blue kind of primordial goo? We showed it at TONO a few months before the Biennale at this amazing museum in Chapultepec Park, Dolores Cárcamo, and the performance happened in front of a mosaic of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water, which was designed by Diego Rivera. So it’s like these amazing spaces that is really fun for artists to work with, and then for international audiences, it’s fun for them to see work in a setting with which they’re not so familiar.

These international relationships that you’re building require a lot of travel. Both for the works that wind up at TONO, but also for you personally. 

Travel is multiple things. It’s seeing new artists and seeing the exhibitions they’ve done. It’s fundraising, which is a big part of it, and then it’s also speaking with institutions because I want as many audiences as possible to be able to see the projects. Last year we co-commissioned Gabriel Massan: Continuity Flaws: Rumors of a Leak, with the Serpentine, which first showed in London, then came to Mexico, and then went to Brazil. Then, this year, two of the performances are co-commissioned with museums in Europe: Jota Mombaça’s amazing new performance was co-produced with Wiels and will later tour Brussels. And a commission of Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, co-produced with MUDAM, will tour Luxembourg in late spring. It’s important to be available. Following up with people in person is still just so important, regardless of how much we have grown used to using Zoom and WhatsApp. Face-to-face is just still so important, as is understanding how a show feels in a space for what it can mean for a specific work. 

What do you see for TONO’s future?

A big part of TONO is collaborating with larger institutions, and I’d like to think we’ve been pushing other museums to embrace that method of working. So many institutions are financially struggling, whether it’s private donors being more careful with how they’re allocating their funds … or governments changing their plans. I really believe that co-commissioning a piece, for every institution, means not only that you’re sharing the costs but also enabling a wider audience to see it. Isn’t that what we are all trying to do?