Goodman Gallery’s newest iteration of its curatorial initiative SOUTH SOUTH brings together cross-border dialogue through quarterly, guest-curated online exhibitions. Presenting work available from and beyond the gallery roster, this ongoing series fosters exchange and explores reflections on history, our contemporary context and art-making from the perspective of the Global South.
SOUTH SOUTH is an evolving and ongoing curatorial thread established by Goodman Gallery in 2015. Taking its title from the term originally coined Brazil's president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silvaby and foreign policy aimed to reinforce integration between major powers of the countries thought of at the time as the “developing world”.
First explored in the gallery’s flagship space in Johannesburg as an exhibition titled The Poetry In Between, the inaugural installment focused on Southern Africa and Brazil, showing work by Igshaan Adams, Marcelo Cidade, David Goldblatt, Sonia Gomes, Cildo Meireles, among others. Rooted within the first SOUTH SOUTH [then South-South] was a consideration of the invention of both South America and Africa, providing a space to consider constructions and generalisations surrounding and connecting both continents. Integral to building an understanding of the south as one global region, but also as an idea, is acknowledging its hybridity, particularly with regard to cultural production. These notions of crossing and circulation are at the heart of SOUTH SOUTH.
The second iteration Let me begin again (2017) in Cape Town built on this foundation, with an exhibition including artists whose work is situated within and beyond the afterlife of political revolution, featuring Los Carpinteros, Kudzanai Chiurai, Ângela Ferreira, Coco Fusco, Carlos Garaicoa, Grada Kilomba, and others.
As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, gallery owner and director Liza Essers extended SOUTH SOUTH into an online curatorial and sales platform, archive and community for galleries, artists, collectors, institutions and not-for-profits invested in the Global South. The platform–guided by a circle of gallery-led collaborators–brought together 50+ galleries for sales and curatorial interventions, a Talks and Film programme, as well as support for non-profit partners. The platform also led to the formation of an ambassador group made up of top international collectors and philanthropists dedicated to championing historically overlooked artists and sidelined regions.
2025 sees the next phase of SOUTH SOUTH, building on a responsive curatorial initiative that explores political threads and context-specific artistic practice from and connected to the Global South.