Curatorial

Initiatives

Since 2008, under the leadership of owner and director Liza Essers, Goodman Gallery has been a committed to sustained curatorial inquiry – developed through long-term initiatives that extend beyond exhibition-making to foster dialogue, research, mentorship and transnational exchange. Through platforms such as South South, [Working Title] and In Context, the gallery foregrounds artistic and intellectual practices from the Global South, supports emerging voices, and presents artists whose work addresses movement, belonging, and suppressed histories.

South South is a long-term curatorial initiative conceived as a framework for exchange across the Global South. Launched in 2015 as an exchange between South Africa and Brazil, it combined exhibitions, research travel, residencies, and collaborative production, later expanding to include artists across Africa and Latin America through exhibitions and film programmes from 2017–2021. In 2020, the initiative was reimagined as a collaborative online platform, scaling its founding vision and broadening its focus to the Global Majority – cultural producers who constitute most of the world’s population yet remain underrepresented within dominant Euro-American art circuits. Today, South South continues through a quarterly externally curated programme on Goodman Gallery’s website, placing artists beyond the gallery’s roster in dialogue with those it represents and extending its commitment to cross-regional exchange.

Originally launched in 2009 as an exhibition platform for emerging and under-recognised voices, it has evolved into a sustained framework for artistic development, collaboration and institutional exchange. From its earliest editions, [Working Title] functioned as a space of experimentation within the gallery’s programme. The 2013 iteration in Johannesburg brought together artists working across disciplines, from performance and sound to interactive media and gaming, and included a keynote lecture by Achille Mbembe that framed the exhibition within broader debates on postcolonial thought. In Cape Town in 2014, the platform expanded its geographic scope to include artists based in Benin, Nigeria, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, foregrounding questions of representation, technology and political responsibility. By 2015, with To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, curated by Hank Willis Thomas, [Working Title] engaged directly with global Black consciousness and diasporic histories, positioning emerging practices within a wider transnational discourse.

Conceived in response to South Africa hosting the World Cup and temporarily becoming “home” to the world, the initiative began as a reflection on visibility, locality and the shifting meanings of context in an increasingly transnational art landscape.