It is no secret that prominent art galleries tend to lean towards the Global North artists when it comes to exhibitions and auctions, and galleries in the Global South don’t make as much profit. There is a gap in the market when it comes to artists from the Global South who offer a wide range of perspectives, other than the sporadic tokenism. This bunch is talented and deserves as much recognition as their peers from the US or Europe but the status quo is hard to break. To address this problem, Goodman Gallery’s Liza Essers came up with a new venture ‘South South’ which is an aggregator for galleries devoted to such artists and galleries.
This platform will have an archive that will “form a central repository for texts and content, providing an alternative art history.” It will officially launch in February 2021 with South-South Veza. This selling event will use auction technology to try to create some of the buzz and competition missing from standard fair online viewing rooms. Essers devised this initiative after noticing how these galleries were suffering during the pandemic. Year-round events will be held to address the imbalance in the art world by exploring alternative art centers within a broader geopolitical context.
The Veza will run from 5 to 10 February with over 40 galleries and is described as a “hybrid of a live, by invitation only selling event powered by auction technology and a peer-led Online Viewing Room (OVR).” Some percentage of profits will go to non-profit art organizations. The Veza will be accompanied by a talks programme organized by Elvira DyanganiOse (director of The Showroom in London), a film programme overseen by Rodrigo Moura (the chief curator of New York’s Museo del Barrio) and a concurrent online exhibition co-curated by two Angola-based curators, Paula Nascimento and Suzana Sousa. Participating South-South galleries include the 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).
