Christa Dee

‘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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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 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.

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.