Tatiana Blass at CIFO.

Tatiana Blass’s incredible installation in the latest CIFO exhibit includes about a dozen silver-metal drums and cymbals all set up on white-splashed microcrystalline wax on gray cement floor. Drums, percussion instruments, have always served a dual purpose, as musical components and as tools for communication, yet Blass has created a series where she has made the musical instruments in a sense mute (she’s also a performance artist). Which is why this piece fits in – in a conceptual way — with this top-notch show titled “Unsaid/Spoken,” selections from the Ella Fontanals and CIFO collections.

This year’s main show for the exhibition space downtown – opened up in time for Art Basel — was created by the CIFO Curatorial Award Recipients of 2012 José Roca, based in Bogota, Colombia, and Moacir dos Anjos from Recife, Brazil. They have pulled together a complex and beautiful experience with some of the most intriguing names in Latin American art – and a smattering from elsewhere as well. This is how they describe what they have tried to say, and what they haven’t: “This exhibition brings together work that testifies to the tension between what is yet to be said (or cannot be uttered) and the aftermath of communication, when all has been said and done. Silenced speech, timid elocutions, unintelligible languages, unknown codes, forgotten tongues, the somewhat obscure discourse of science, censorship and repression, slowly give way to murmurs, connections, bridges, open conversations and conclusive statements. Following an intuitive process of formal association and conceptual juxtaposition, the show intends to be seen as an exercise in curatorial collaboration.”

So look who else is “talking” here: Los Carpinteros, the fascinating collective out of Cuba; Rivane Neuenschwander, who recently had a solo show at MAM, from Brazil; the never-disappointing Gabriel Orozco, of Mexico; the Cuban-American Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who departed this world far too early over a decade ago; and the Belgian-native and filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose pieces always stand apart. Those are just a few of the 24 artists, who have contributed 38 pieces, who have given CIFO yet again a strong voice in our local art scene. It’s a fine, conceptual exhibit to celebrate CIFO’s 10th birthday – hard to believe they’ve been around for a decade, with their mission to promote and support Latin American contemporary art.

“Unsaid/Spoken” runs through March 3 at CIFO, 1018 N. Miami Ave., Miami; www.cifo.org (admission is free).