SOUTH SOUTH VEZA: Group show

SOUTH SOUTH is an online community, an anthology, an archive and a resource for artists, galleries, curators and collectors invested in the Global South.

In the often disputed battleground of global history writing and history making, showcasing one’s own history is not an easy task, nor is it a unilateral one. This curated presentation of drawings, sculpture, textile and mixed media installations by Chemould Prescott Road balances this very delicate tension of multiple vantage points of identity, memory and territory whilst steadfastly holding crucial space for the South in global narrative building. 

Desmond Lazaro’s gold and pigment laden Dymaxion Map III creates a non-hierarchical comprehension of the world, absent of embedded cultural identifiers of up-down, North-South. This cartographic revisitation is complemented through Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand Drawn Maps of my Country documenting the differences in people’s idea of territorial belonging versus the reality experienced by them in Ecuador, India, South Korea, Israel/Palestine. The above multiplicity of mark making through carbon on paper find their static copper sculptural companion in Gupta’s MapTracing#1-IN. This is nuanced further by Reena Kallat’s River Drawings displaying the aching futility of physical barbed-wire boundaries attempting to create ownership of natural entities like water.

Mithu Sen’s Nothing Lost In Translation insists on widening this story telling of public consciousness by creating ambiguous forms on Japanese kozo paper, not restricted by immediate locality, or gender, race, caste, class. This continuing paradox of certain realities being cultural equalizers, such as endless, yet finite, consciousness experienced while sleeping, is captured through Jitish Kallat’s The Infinite Episode. The restful slumber of it’s scaled down sculptural animal forms is in contrast to the dense pigment dyed animals and birds in Noah’s Ark clamouring at the bottom of this descending scroll-tent in Lavanya Mani’s The Ark Animals of the World Complain to the Raven (after Mishkin). They are sparing no one the urgency of this approaching ecological distress.

In an increasingly divisive world, these ideas of identity, memory and territory presented by these artworks create a much-required space for contemplation, collaboration, and conversation.