Sem Parar

Sem Parar is an intermedia exhibition and live music event that examines the global prominence of the Brazilian music genre, baile funk. Baile funk was pioneered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, taking inspiration from U.S. music styles like hip hop and Miami bass and infusing them with samba rhythms and Afro-Brazilian sounds. Known for its syncopated rhythmic profile and often suggestive language, baile funk has developed an increased global following over the past decade, largely due to its virality on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and co-opting by North American popstars like Bruno Mars, Madonna, and The Weeknd.

The exhibition title borrows the Portuguese term, “sem parar,” a phrase commonly used in baile funk songs that translates to “without stopping.” This titular reference nods to the widespread and rapid circulation of baile funk in popular culture and the digital landscape. Audiovisual installations from CD player listening stations to a salon of smartphones looping trending video and multi-channel presentation of viral dances will immerse audiences in the proliferation of baile funk with a focus on post-internet networks. Also on view will be musical ephemera and vinyl records that highlight Brazil’s robust cultural and artistic exports reaching audiences abroad including samba music in the 1920s and bossa nova in the 1960s.

Sem Parar will culminate in a live music program in Highways’ black box theatre featuring baile funk sets by Asphodèle, Sarita Linda, and B.Joyce, celebrating how baile funk was intended to be listened to: in the presence of others. The exhibition emphasizes the continued importance of Brazil in global artistic expression and connection, and provides a glance into the numerous channels that baile funk has taken to appear in clubs, on playlists, and algorithms around the world.

PERFORMANCE: $15 in advance / $20 at door

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CURATORS

Juliana Maitenaz is a cultural researcher and percussionist from Brooklyn, New York. As a Fulbright research grantee in São Paulo she examined the Brazilian festival, Carnaval, as instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. This work culminated in De Ouvido, a short book about pedagogy and performance in samba schools. She has been published by the Open Society University Network Global Commons, Center on Public Diplomacy, and the State University of São Paulo’s Grupo PIAP: Encontros de Presquisa em Percussão. Juliana received a BA in Global International Studies and a B.Mus in Classical Percussion Performance from Bard College and Conservatory of Music. She is a Cowan Scholar and graduate student in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Storm Bookhard is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. Her practice centers how artists of color and other marginalized practitioners are inscribed within visual and digital culture. Her recent exhibition, Flip It & Reverse It: Spectacles of Blackness in Popular Media interrogated cycles of Black hyper-visibility in mass media through found footage video art. Storm has held positions at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Zwirner, and Regen Projects. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and she has been published by the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), the Boston Art Review, and Harvard University Press. She is the 2025-2026 VisArts Emerging Curator and an incoming PhD candidate at Duke University.