South South

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents South South, an exhibition that examines poetics of space and orientation in works by five Gallery artists: Ricardo Brey, Luis Camnitzer, Melvin Edwards, Regina Silveira, and Valeska Soares. Even as movement across the globe remains constrained, these artists illuminate the imaginative potential of artworks to recontextualize travel, communication, and relation. The works, in a range of mediums, are also presented in a digital exhibition for South South Veza, an online community, anthology, live resource and aggregator dedicated to art from the Global South and its diaspora.

Where Camnitzer’s works place the poetics of time and space on a universal scale, Regina Silveira’s Touch #11 (2013) magnifies subjective, embodied experience. Six square aluminum prints depict silhouetted hands, a motif in Silveira’s work since the 1980s. The tender, personal prints are set against the aluminum in an oversized scale. This distortion in dimension––in this case of such a recognizable, individuated part of the body––creates an effect of both intimacy and mystery, what Silveira calls “gaps in perception.” These moments of simultaneous dissonance and recognition evoke in the viewer a reconsideration of scale, position, and perspective, illuminating the spaces of darkness in our perception and self-knowledge.

Brey’s journeys recall legacies of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, which are indelibly inscribed in the histories of his native Cuba and his current home of Belgium. It is a concern he shares with Melvin Edwards, whose decades-long Lynch Fragments series grapples evocatively with the  experiences of the African diaspora in the United States. Luanda (1999) is one of the many Lynch Fragments focused on Edwards’ relationship with Africa, which has been significant in his work since his first visit to the continent at the height of the independence movements in the 1970s, to the establishment of his studio in Dakar, Senegal, which he has maintained since 2000. Luanda marks the artist’s visit to Angola in 1999, and pays tribute to the artists, intellectuals, and friends with whom he connected there. Straddling both Africa and the African Diaspora, the Lynch Fragments are an embodiment of inseparable histories.

These engagements across time and space are thrown into stark relief at our current point in history, which is so defined by immobility and marked by the presence of mortality. Throughout her career, Valeska Soares has described the complexities of a Brazilian identity whose fluidity can be uncomfortable: Feeling insufficiently Brazilian in her native country, while experiencing a foreigner’s alienation abroad, she occupies a space as a citizen of the world that can feel both cosmopolitan and adrift. This duality between global and individual frequently emerges in her work via a focus on the body, often initially concealed behind refined conceptualist strategies. Soares’s collage series Sugar Blues, begun in 2013, exemplifies this combination of vulnerable human emotions with rigorous formal composition. Made from the wrappers and boxes of sweets Soares has consumed, each piece in Sugar Blues can only exist because she has consumed more, weaving intense feelings of memory, pleasure, and longing into precise visual compositions. The empty wrappers also evoke a sense of melancholy and mortality, as residual markers of a tender interior body that no longer exists. The Sugar Blues works are meditations on the passage of time marked through consumption; their emotional poignancy and conceptual resonance take on a new poignancy in our present context, where time can seem to pass unmoored and unmarked.

Spanning mediums, continents, and languages, with concerns both collective and deeply personal, South South offers multiple points of entry for reconsidering our sense of perspective and our global position.