South SouthCuratorial Initiative
South South is a long-term curatorial initiative conceived as a framework for exchange across the Global South, grounded in the understanding that South-South dialogue is plural, mobile, and unfinished. Launched in 2015 as an exchange between South Africa and Brazil, it combined exhibitions with research travel, artist residencies, and transatlantic production, later expanding to include artists across Africa and Latin America through major exhibitions and film programmes in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In 2021 the initiative was reimagined as a collaborative online platform, enabling its founding vision to operate at scale and marking a shift toward the Global Majority – foregrounding cultural producers who constitute most of the world’s population yet remain structurally marginalised within dominant Euro-American art circuits. Today, South South continues through a quarterly externally curated programme integrated into 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.
While a conversation between Brazil and South Africa anchored the inaugural edition, subsequent iterations expanded its curatorial scope: the 2017 edition extended dialogue to include artists from Cuba, Angola, and Mozambique; and the 2019 edition culminated in a major exhibition across Johannesburg and Cape Town, alongside a film programme bringing together artists from across Africa and Latin America, later presented at arteBA in Argentina. Across these presentations, South South addressed concerns ranging from histories of enslavement to spiritual and cosmological imaginaries beyond Western frameworks, alongside questions of post-colonial identity and contemporary realities shaped by urbanisation, inequality, mobility, and economic transformation.
The collaborative South South platform – launched in 2021 in deep pandemic lockdown – broadened participation to include galleries, artists, curators and collectors across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. Through publicly accessible online exhibitions, talks, and film programmes – alongside partnerships with organisations, museums and art fairs including RAW Material Company, Green Papaya Art Projects, Casa do Povo, El Museo del Barrio, SP–ARTE, and FNB Art Joburg, as well as residencies supported by South South ambassadors such as Jorge M. Pérez and El Espacio 23 – it fostered horizontal exchange and expanded access to critical discourse and time-based practices often excluded from mainstream distribution and market visibility.
Past South South Exhibitions
