New gallery plat­form South South launch­es to pro­mote art from out­side the dom­i­nant US-Europe axis

We talk a lot, in the US-Euro­pean focused art world, about increas­ing the promi­nence of art from the Glob­al South.

But if some­one asked you where they could go to find gal­leries from, say, Cape Town or Buenos Aires or Mani­la, or read aca­d­e­m­ic texts about their artists, what would you say? Prob­a­bly Google ​“gal­leries in Mani­la”. And repeat for each city.

That is why Liza Essers, the own­er of South Africa- and Lon­don-based Good­man Gallery, decid­ed in the long hours of lock­down to cre­ate ​“an aggre­ga­tor for gal­leries devot­ed to artists with diverse per­spec­tives,” with an archive that will ​“form a cen­tral repos­i­to­ry for texts and con­tent pro­vid­ing an alter­na­tive art history.”

So was born South South, a new gallery-led plat­form which will offi­cial­ly launch in Feb­ru­ary 2021 with South South Veza, a sell­ing event using auc­tion tech­nol­o­gy to try to cre­ate some of the buzz and com­pe­ti­tion miss­ing from stan­dard fair online view­ing rooms.

“I found all the OVRs to be very flat as an expe­ri­ence,” Essers says. ​“You can­not recre­ate the atmos­phere of the vernissage at Art Basel.” The auc­tion tech­nol­o­gy, Essers hopes, will recre­ate ​“the impe­tus to buy” of a live event. No prices will be shared, nor infor­ma­tion on what is sold or not sold. Gal­leries will, how­ev­er, know the iden­ti­ty of the buy­er and underbidders.

In future, it is hoped that the South South Veza will man­i­fest phys­i­cal­ly in Johan­nes­burg, Lon­don, Mex­i­co City, Mia­mi, New York City and Tokyo — details of which to come.

Par­tic­i­pat­ing South South gal­leries include: Addis Fine Art (Addis Aba­ba, Lon­don), Rele Gallery (Lagos), Gyp­sum (Cairo), A Gen­til Car­i­o­ca (Rio de Janeiro), Luisa Stri­na (São Paulo), Anna Schwartz (Mel­bourne), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), Exper­i­menter (Kolkata), Blum & Poe (Los Ange­les, New York, Tokyo), Monique Meloche Gallery (Chica­go) and Stephen Fried­man (Lon­don).

The full arti­cle is avail­able here.