Lara

Through an exploration Global South-based collectives contributing to documenta fifteen see the emphasis on people, community and exchange that is the central component of this year’s edition.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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 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.