This June, the South London Gallery will bring together over fourteen international artists whose work grapples with the language of remapping the architecture of an ever-unfolding afterlife of historical colonial violence, for a major group exhibition. The Show is Over is curated by the respected Johannesburg based curator Gabi Ngcobo, in dialogue with Oscar Murillo.
Working and thinking from historically connected localities, the artists included take personal approaches to the subject of global politics through gestures of refusal and mourning that establish active and refreshed relationships with the history of power. The Show is Over confronts the reality that notions of the end of the world are both constantly evolving and more present than ever before so that the end of the world has become an event evolving over time.
On the exhibition, Co-Curator Gabi Ngocobo said: “It has been an exciting and challenging task to put together this curatorial project, which, like many others, had to go through two years of postponements due to uncertainty about what kind of world we could potentially inhabit. We have had to learn new grammar and language in order to live again, dream again and in order to contain loss, again. The Show is Over is a contribution to a search for new vocabularies. The exhibition features voices of artists who, as part of their life practices, reflect on these questions, often with recurring inquiries into the possibility of living differently with others.”
Oscar Murillo said of the work he is presenting in the show: “Conditions yet not known, a title of a show currently at the National University of Colombia Museum is the kind of title that obliterates all notions of surface and identity. It also brings to mind All the world’s futures, the Venice Biennale of 2015 where I presented the work signalling devices in now bastard territory. It is indeed this ongoing body of black canvases that have been shown in numerous types of places, occasions and geographies, where it is no longer about representation of any kind but more accurately it is about sensing loss, peril and renewal as a collective ecosystem in the context of humankind.”
Artists involved include: Karimah Ashadu, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Anawana Haloba, Banele Khoza, Donna Kukama, Moshekwa Langa, Tessa Mars, Misheck Masamvu, Santu Mofokeng, Santiago Mostyn, Oscar Murillo, Las Nietas de Nono?, Ishkar Richard, Helen Sebidi, and Luana Vitra.
South London Gallery, Main Building 65–67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH from 24th June – 4th September
South London Gallery, Fire Station, 82 Peckham Road, London, SE15 5LQ
Times: Tue – Fri 11am-6pm, Sat and Sun 11am-6pm. Late opening: every Wed and last Fri of the month until 9pm. Admission: Free
www.southlondongallery.org