Özge Ersoy is a curator and writer; Public Programmes Lead at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; and the Managing Editor at m-est.org. Her work interrogates sociopolitical milieus while thinking through the threads that exist between exhibition-making, text, archival practices and collecting. SOUTH SOUTH interviewed Ersoy to find out more about her practice and to get a peek at the list of publications that have been her companions over the past year.

‘Particles in Motion’ is a layered fusion of Ada Udechukwu’s poetry woven through and around her lyrical art, demanding us to be silent, in order to feel the soft vibration of her interpretation of our complex world. The detailed catalogue that accompanies the exhibition includes an essay written by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Professor of African and African Diaspora Art at Princeton University. Learn more about Udechukwu through access to the entire catalogue.

Learn more about Misheck Masamvu’s practice and artistic journey through a conversation with curator and educator Gabi Ngcobo that took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 3 October 2018. This conversation formed part of Masamvu’s catalogue titled ‘Still’.

On 30 April 2021 art writer Andrew Maerkle moderated a conversation between artist Danh Vo and curator Yuka Uematsu about the exhibition ‘Danh Vo oV hnaD’ held at the National Museum of Art Osaka from June 2 to October 11, 2020. In this talk the three revisit how the pandemic shaped the realization of the exhibition and do a virtual walkthrough of the show.

Honolulu Biennial (HB17) debuted in 2017, featuring 33 artists from over a dozen countries and Hawai’i, and ran from 8 March – 8 May. HB17 was curated by Fumio Nanjo, director of Mori Art Museum, and Ngahiraka Mason, former Indigenous Curator at Auckland Art Gallery | Toi o Tamaki. Complementing the multi-sited exhibition, was an offering of 65 different public programmes, including keiki art making workshops, lectures, performances, poetry readings, film screening, panel discussions and guided public tours.

For 4th edition of the Kampala Art Biennale, KAB20, acclaimed curator Simon Njami came up with a concept grounded in knowledge sharing. An invitation was extended to international artists considered masters in their field to give workshops to younger artists, from Uganda, Africa and the world, forming studios to incubate and manifest ideas through collective engagement.

In this talk Southern Stars Projects director Gabriela Salgado and artist Shannon Te Ao discuss the focus of his practice in relation to concepts of time, closeness and intimacy, drawing from Māori oral history and sonic materials present in his works of the past decade.

Art Consulting Tool (Act.) initiates and is involved in projects related to curatorial practice, publications and other forms of artistic spatial practice. There recent book 20 in 2020: The Artists of the Next Decade – Latin America highlights Latin American artists who they and those they worked with believe will redefine the artistic and cultural horizon in the decade to come. SOUTH SOUTH spoke one of the book’s editors and Act. co-founder, Fernando Ticoulat.

This exhibition took its title from artist Otobong Nkanga’s performance piece ‘Diaoptasia’, presented at Tate Modern, London, in 2015. Instead of departing from a theme, the exhibition’s foundations were laid from a selection of works on paper by Nkanga, which provided ground for other artists’ works to address the need to challenge Eurocentric historical narratives.

‘Crafting Communities’ was an exhibition that took place at the Asia Art Archive Library in Hong Kong in 2020, and considered the history of ‘Womanifesto’; a feminist biennial programme active in Thailand from 1997 to 2008 that created space for women artists in an art scene dominated by men. ‘Crafting Communities’ forms part of the work that Asia Art Archive is doing with ‘Womanifesto’ to digitise their archive. The exhibition supplemented efforts to make the significance of ‘Womanifesto’ visible through access to materials and highlighting the impact their programming.

Art spaces can often have an intimate relationship with their cities and have the possibility to invite inhabitants to reimagine their associations with particular locations. Marfa’ Projects in Beirut is a gallery that has been able to do this. It has moved past initial conservative remarks about the impracticality of having a space for art in an abandoned garage near the entrance to the port to becoming a key location point within the arts ecosystem in the city.

Curator and writer Guy Brett and artist David Medalla passed away in February 2021 and December 2020 respectively. Together they established the gallery Signals London and published Signals Newsbulletin between 1964 – 1966, along with fellow co-founders Paul Keeler, Gustav Metzger and Marcello Salvadori. A cross-disciplinary space invested in experimental practices, Signals London also played an important part in the recognition of artists from Latin America in a context and market in which they were overlooked.

The title for Dak’Art 2016 ‘The City in the Blue Daylight’ was taken from a poem by Leopold Sedar Senghor, specifically the line, ‘Your voice tells us about the Republic that we shall erect the City in the Blue Daylight In the equality of sister nations. And we, we answer: Presents, Ô Guélowâr!’

I’m really excited by the idea of creating an image that’s immediately visually seductive, something that garners a really strong visceral response, and entices the viewer to really sit with it for a while and work through it. I’m always excited when work can create a response that’s complex, and in my case I think the tension between the image and the subject matter can create that complexity.

Considering the culture induced by the art world’s “scarcity economy” (a lack of resources and opportunities circulating within the institutional network that has bred a culture of fierce competition), Green Papaya’s generosity in terms of resource sharing has been immensely helpful especially for younger artists and cultural workers who persist outside of the mainstream circles.

What began as an intended dialogue between Angolan artist Sandra Poulson and South African artist of Angolan heritage, Helena Uambembe, evolved into a reflection on the nature of self-censorship by the latter. Both artists are concerned with the idea of the archive, what it is, and who authors it, addressing the gaps in the way the history of Angolans has been represented both in Angola and other parts of southern Africa.

The DMZ is only 30-40 minutes away from Seoul, but it is largely a forgotten place in our everyday reality. People have learned to forget about the division and the tragic war that is still pending. The Real DMZ Project aims to raise awareness and bring the issues to our everyday consciousness. Iterating the border issues in diverse forms in different locations can help us approach the DMZ from diversified perspectives and can bring us closer to the border issues that have been predominantly political and military.

The Dymaxion Map was created by designer, architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller in the mid 20th century. We reached out to the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) in San Francisco and had a conversation with Kurt Przybilla, a long time BFI member and advisor. Together we nerded out over the history of the map and its significance for thinking about the relationship between perceptions of the Earth’s geography and its sociopolitical consequence

In North America’s deep South, a region where the Ku Klux Klan was born and the civil rights movement later had some of its most significant moments, María Campos-Pons has built what she calls the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice. In this powerful seminar series, she is driving a dynamic vision of various notions of the South that compels a profound reconsideration from the North.

Ten years ago, gallerists Prateek and Priyanka Raja established Experimenter Curators’ Hub (ECH) as a platform for developing and sustaining discourse on curatorial practice and exhibition-making. In what became an overwhelmingly well-attended, intensive annual programme, the hub has brought a diverse and prominent group of international curators to Kolkata, India – from Naomi Beckwith, to Adam Szymczyk, and Léuli Eshrāghi – to illuminate the thinking behind their curatorial practice.

A project conceived by Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker, TITAN was an outdoor exhibition in a series of phone booths located in New York City, presented by Mexico and US based gallery kurimanzutto. The project enabled twelve voices to take over the outer panels of twelve phone kiosks. In what the organisers termed a “collective exhibition”, this intervention took place in the last life of these booths prior to their planned removal by the city, and during one of the most tumultuous presidential election and post-election periods in US history.

The title of the 2020 Yokohama Triennale, “AFTERGLOW”, was chosen in reference to how, in our everyday lives, we unknowingly experience the residues of light sparked at the beginning of our time, as in the case of how the “white noise” on our analog televisions included fragments of cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the cosmic Big Bang.

The title for the biennial, How To Build a Lagoon with Just a Bottle of Wine?, was inspired by a line in the poem A Song for Lagos by Nigerian writer Akeem Lasisi. By posing this as a question, the curators were able to encourage the contributing artists to thinking inventively and poetically about urban narratives and imaginaries, and allow them to find direction from the title in their own way.

Histórias afro-atlânticas (Afro-Atlantic Histories) was the second in the “historias” series, taking place across two major venues in São Paulo in 2018 – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The exhibition was motivated by an exploration of parallels and frictions across what Paul Gilroy termed the Black Atlantic, considering the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories – their experiences, creations, patterns of worship and philosophy.

Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Dr. Yvette Mutumba, A Labour of Love took place at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2017. This show presented 150 of the original 600 works acquired from South Africa by Hans Blum on behalf of the Weltkulturen Museum in 1986. These pieces form a large part of the museum’s contemporary African art collection and were exhibited in South Africa for the first time with this show.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power was first presented at Tate Modern in 2017, travelling to venues in the US for the next two years.  The exhibition text explains the very decisive timeline, with the show opening in 1963, “at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration”.

One of the core interests of documenta 14, which took place in 2017, was the cause of decentralising and decolonising the northwestern canon. The concept was announced by Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk in 2012. One of the most surprising and controversial aspects, perhaps, of Szymczyk’s announcement, was that documenta 14 would take place in equal parts ac ross the cities of Kassel and Athens under the slogan “Learning from Athens”.

Art and China after 1989 presented work by 71 key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms.

Curated by Christine Tohme, the biennial featured over fifty international artists. The five parts of SB13 were an online depository of research material, four projects curated by four Interlocutors outside of the UAE, a year-long education programme in Sharjah, a year-long online publishing platform and a public programme in two parts.

The 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, INCERTEZA VIVA (Live Uncertainty), in 2016 proposed to look at notions of uncertainty and the strategies offered by contemporary art to embrace or inhabit it.

For the 2016 edition of the EVA International Biennale in Limerick, curator Koyo Kouoh presented Still (the) Barbarians, reminding readers of the catalogue that Ireland is “the first and foremost colonial laboratory of the British enterprise.”

“Hacking Conflict – Indonesia meets Nigeria” was the 3rd edition of the BJ (Biennale Jogja) Equator series, following the first edition in 2011 (India) and 2013 (five Middle East countries). Managed in a new vision and direction by Yogyakarta Biennale Foundation, the Equator series present a strategy that utilises the line the Equator draws around the globe as a concrete practice in exploring and re-reading the world, visioned and projected until the year 2022.

The 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, presented the notion that “with and through art, we commit ourselves to the possibility of joy and vitality, leaping from form to flourishing life.”

The 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice, titled All The World’s Futures has been variously remembered as one of the most conceptual or political editions of what is considered the world’s principal biennale. Some critics have pointed to the exhibition’s ostensible “darkness”, others have celebrated its exploration of what they termed the “global periphery”.

The 10th edition of the Gwangju Biennale in 2014, Burning Down the House, had curator Jessica Morgan as Artistic Director, who ensured her curatorial framing remained invested in the city’s political history. The title for the Biennale was taken from the American band Talking Head’s 80’s song ‘Burning Down the House’. The song explores ideas related to burning and transformation, destruction and renewal; a core thematic thread for the biennale, with this cycle being a pattern witnessed throughout history.

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, forming part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, presented a nuanced reconsideration of contemporary art in Latin America. According to curator Pablo León de la Barra, this extensive show aimed to present “a diversity of creative responses to a rich cultural context shaped by colonialism, civil conflict, economic crisis, social inequality, and repression – as well as by intervals of growth and the emergence of parallel modernities”.

In a powerful research project initiated by Astrup Fearnley Museet, Imagine Brazil showcased Brazilian contemporary art through a compelling curatorial approach. Exhibition curators Gunnar B. Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Thierry Raspail invited a group of emergent Brazilian artists to produce new work, and in addition select an older artist who they considered influential, to accompany them in the exhibition.

Documenta (13) directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was only the second to be led by a woman. It was notable for many others reasons, including an assembly of recruited “agents” from all over the world for her team of advisors led by Chus Martínez from Spain; an explanation that the theme was a “non-concept,” with a long, rambling poetic title (The dance was frenetic, animated, clattering, twisted, and lasted a long time), and a parallel exhibition in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic took place at the Tate Liverpool in 2010 and was ultimately inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). As the organisers described it, the exhibition identified a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe.

Documenta11 in 2002 was led by the first non-European art director – Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor – who created what is remembered as a foundational global and postcolonial edition of this seminal event in Kassel, Germany. This iteration of documenta rested on five platforms that aimed to “describe the present location of culture and its interfaces with other complex, global knowledge systems,” Enwezor explained, with documeta 11 being the 5th and final in this series of platforms.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a landmark exhibition exploring the confluence of African culture and independence through art, film, photography, graphics, architecture, music, literature, and theatre. Featuring works by more than 50 artists from 22 countries, the exhibition was notably extensive, occupying the entire three floors of MoMA P.S.1 in New York City.

Cities on the Move was a seminal traveling exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. The exhibition toured to multiple locations from 1997 to 1999, exploring the cultural influence of East Asia’s meteoric urban development in the late twentieth century through the lens of visual art, architecture, and film.

The 2nd and final Johannesburg Biennale took place in 1997 under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor, who at the time had been appointed as the curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. The biennale differed in structure to its 1995 predecessor. It was composed of a series of exhibitions with 6 international curators.

The Bienal de la Habana, when first established in 1984 offered a singular and crucial meeting place for art from the region, exhibiting artists solely from Latin America and the Caribbean. In the second edition in 1986, the Bienal included art from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, becoming one of the most important platforms for artists from outside the West.