LONDON.- Marking the Guggenheim’s first major collaboration and exhibition presentation in the UK, Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, opens at the
South London Gallery, 10 June 2016.
The exhibition is part of the global project, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, a multi-year acquisitions programme that will strengthen the international reach of the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. Under the Same Sun brings a survey of contemporary art practice from Latin American to south London, home to one of the largest Latin American communities in Europe. Thanks to the support of UBS, the Guggenheim presentation will also offer the first public view of the South London Gallery’s new exhibition space, the former Peckham Road Fire Station.
The exhibition has been organised by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, in collaboration with the team at the South London Gallery, and highlights recently acquired works by more than forty artists working with mediums and methods including installation, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Participating artists include: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Marianna Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Raimond Chaves and Gilda Mantilla, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Eduardo Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Diaz, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Tamar Guimarães, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas with Hildegarde Duane, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.
Under the Same Sun examines a diversity of creative responses by artists to complex, shared realities. The exhibition focuses on work made by artists born after 1968, in addition to several early pioneers who were active internationally in the 1960s and ’70s, many of whom have been influenced by shared colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, social inequality, and concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. Special projects commissioned specifically for the South London Gallery edition of the exhibition include:
On a screen in central London, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar presents the first UK-broadcast of A Logo for America, a work which was first screened in Times Square in the 80s. Originally presented alongside scheduled advertisements on an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square in 1987, the work challenges the ethnocentrism of the United States, which habitually claims the identity of the entire American continent as its own. His work, A Logo for America (1987) will also be on view in the exhibition.
From July to August, for the first time in more than twenty years, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera will be in residence in the UK. Bruguera plans to use the residency to further develop her ongoing research project Immigrant Movement International (IMI) through a series of think tank sessions, co-hosted by sociologist Saskia Sassen. The residency will conclude with a public talk at the London School of Economics on 18 August, 7pm. Bruguera’s work Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) (2009) will be on view in the exhibition.
Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero will work with local residents to transform a children’s playground in Peckham with a distinctive, brightly coloured floor mural. Sited at the Pelican Estate located behind the SLG’s new building, the former Peckham Road Fire Station, Herrero’s residency includes multiple events for Pelican residents, involving group painting, music and food. Herrero’s practice stands outside Latin America’s traditions of conceptualism, muralism, and geometric abstraction, yet his work references all of these styles. In the exhibition, Herrero will also present Pan de Azúcar (2014), titled after Rio de Janeiro’s iconic peak that depicts a towering black monolith, in a composition that captures, in the artist’s words, “the soul of the mountain”.
Argentinian artist Amalia Pica will work with invited participants to present her performance Asamble (2015) in Peckham Square on 11 June, at 12pm. Performers are asked to bring a chair from their home and congregate in a choreographed, circular assembly that never closes. Pica’s 2013 work A ∩ B ∩ C (read as “A intersection B intersection C”), will be on view in the exhibition and activated by gallery staff every Saturday, 1pm. The work references the fact that, during the 1970s, Argentina’s military junta forbade Venn diagrams and the related concept of intersection from being taught in elementary schools, viewing them as potentially subversive. In A ∩ B ∩ C, performers manipulate translucent coloured shapes, producing configurations that use intersection as an invitation to reimagine collaboration and community.
