Work by artist Ana Hupe. PHOTO: Disclosure

The result of a broader research and collaboration project between artists from different countries of the South, the exhibition Conversations in Gondwana from February 7th at the Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP), works created in partnership by Brazilian and South African artists.

Gondwana is the name of the supercontinent that about 200 million years ago brought together the continental masses of what we now call South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and India. As curators Juliana Caffé and Juliana Gontijo explain, “the project evokes this distant geological past in order to intensify the flow of practices and research between artists, curators and researchers from these regions”.

For the first edition of Conversations in Gondwana five pairs were formed, always with a Brazilian and a South African artist: Aline Xavier and Haroon Gunn-Salie; Ana Hupe and Gabrielle Goliath; Clara Ianni and Mikhael Subotzky; Daniel Lima and Ismail Farouk; and Paulo Nimer PJota and Siwa Mgoboza. The exhibition at the CCSP also features a section entitled Archipelago, with works by Kemang Wa Lehulere, Penny Siopis, Cinthia Marcelle, Jean Meeran, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Marcelo Moscheta and Renata de Bonis.

In the words of the curators: “In this communicational way allied to aesthetic invention, perhaps we can glimpse something of what Walter Mignolo calls 'critical frontier thinking': that which starts from subaltern epistemologies and breaks through the dominant geopolitics of the colonial and capitalist world-system to displace borders, horizontalize dialogues and diversify knowledge”.

Next Saturday, February 9th, conversations with the artists will address the main themes addressed in the exhibition: post-colonialist identities and representations; crisis and politics; land and economy; gender, society and post-colonialism; and violence and imprisonment.

Conversations in Gondwana

From February 7th to April 7th, 2019

São Paulo Cultural Center – Rua Vergueiro, 1000

Free admission


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