South-South: Interruptions & Encounters

Opening Reception: Thursday April 2, 2009 (6 pm - 8 pm)

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters stages an unprecedented intervention by bringing together eight artists whose work is situated at an intersection of African and South Asian history, politics, or culture. These encounters occur in a variety of forms and locations: Trinidad's Carnival, a South African ghetto, the music of Black Britain, a family's history of migration from East Africa, the colonial monuments of a historic slave port, and the actual speaking voice of an artist. Concerned with a common set of questions about identity and history, each artist also addresses these Southern intersections formally, either by transfiguring the parameters of a particular medium (photography, sculpture, video, installation, or performance) or through interrupting normative representations of "India" and "Africa."

The exhibition challenges us to imagine new geographies of cultural production that de-centre the continuing dominance of "Northern" artistic institutions and canons. The works also make visible a little-known history of interconnections between the peoples and cultures of Africa and South Asia, spanning pre-colonial and colonial trading networks throughout the Indian Ocean to 20th century struggles against imperialism, racism, and Apartheid. As a result, we are invited to confront the powerful and contemporaneous nature of a colonial "past," which never remains simply in the past.

This exhibition is part of South-South Encounters: Conversations Across Africa, Caribbean and South Asia, organised by New College (University of Toronto) and supported by the Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts. A year-long series of events including five public panels, two film screenings, a community outreach workshop, and a course, South-South Encounters brings scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and their diasporas together in a unique public conversation.

With work by Omar Badsha, Allan deSouza, Brendan Fernandes, Marlon Griffith, Jamelie Hassan, Apache Indian, Louise Liliefeldt, and Hew Locke.

Curated by: Tejpal S. Ajji and Jon Soske

Co-organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre)

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters
Kuratoren: Tejpal S. Ajji, Jon Soske

Künstler: Omar Badsha, Allan deSouza, Brendan Fernandes, Marlon Griffith, Jamelie Hassan, Apache Indian, Louise Liliefeldt, Hew Locke