Please join us to celebrate the launch of the new book Future Souths with readings and responses by Verónica Tello, Ivan Muñiz Reed, Talia Smith, and Nick Croggon. The event will be followed by drinks.
Future Souths, initiated and introduced by Verónica Tello, is the culmination of an online dialogical project that began in 2017.
Future Souths is written by eighteen authors from the Americas, Australia, Asia, South Africa and Europe, radically reconsidering the geo-spatial bases and biases of contemporary art history and discourse. It proposes a fluid, collective, contingent re-consideration of key art concepts from embodied and geo-located vantage points, perspectives, and experiences of the south. The dialogues explore methods, concepts, and theories grounded in the materialities of archives, histories, borders, and context-specificity. The authors denaturalise the global north-centrism that dominates contemporary art discourse and vocabularies, including its privileging of historical signifiers such as “1989.” Future Souths affirms the generative possibilities of southern thinking and methods, specifically communal ones, for manifesting new futures for contemporary art history.
With the rise of globalisation and the end of the Cold War, the centre-periphery dichotomy has collapsed, heralding a supposed end of Eurocentrism and the dawn of the contemporary. Yet, despite all the talk of decentralising discourse and the infrastructures of global art, the West, or the global north, still dominates. Future Souths offers an alternative history and geography of contemporary art discourse, rediscovering its multiple beginnings, initiators and routes.
With essays and dialogues led by Verónica Tello, Dylan A. T. Miner, Zoe Butt, Rolando López, Edgar Alejandro Hernández, Carla Macchiavello, Walter D. Mignolo, Rachel O’Reilly and Ruth Simbao, and contributions from James Nguyen, Salote Tawale, Chandra Frank, Katherine Carl, Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Angela Mitropoulos, Jennifer Biddle, Fernando do Campo, and Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi.
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Design: Zenobia Ahmed and Alexandra Margetic
Publishers: Third Text Publications and Discipline: London and Melbourne/Naarm
Sales via Central Books and Discipline (Available now! Australia and the Rest of World)
Verónica Tello is an art historian, writer, editor, teacher, and curator. Her research predominantly focuses on transnational art histories — and their archives — in and out of Australia, Chile, the Pacific, and Latin America. Her writings have appeared in Third Text, Memory Studies, Afterall, and Artforum. She is a Sydney editor of Memo Review and editor-in-chief of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. Tello is a senior lecturer in contemporary art history and theory at UNSW Art & Design.
Ivan Muñiz Reed is a curator, writer and researcher focussing on Australian and Latin American practices and perspectives from the global south. He is currently working as Strategic Projects Manager at the Powerhouse Museum. Previously, he worked with Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, USA, on a series of collection-based research initiatives and as an advisor for acquisitions and partnerships in Asia-Pacific. He is also a former Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Talia Smith is a curator and artist from New Zealand, Aotearoa, currently based in Sydney, Australia. She is of Cook Island, Sāmoan and New Zealand–European heritage. She has curated shows in Australia and New Zealand, including at the Museum of Contemporary (MCA), Artbank, Cement Fondu, IMA Brisbane, Ballarat Photo Biennale 2021, and Papakura Art Gallery. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Memo Review, Running Dog, Vault Magazine, Art Almanac and Art New Zealand.
Nicholas Croggon is an art historian, editor, and critic. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University, a co-founder of the Melbourne-based contemporary art publisher and journal Discipline, and the Events and programs Officer at The Power Institute at the University of Sydney.
