Join us to celebrate the launch of the new book Future Souths with readings and responses by Verónica Tello, James Nguyen, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Lana Nguyen, and Lucreccia Quintanilla.
About the book:
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.
Authors: Essays by Verónica Tello, Dylan A. T. Miner, Zoe Butt, Edgar Alejandro Hernández, Rolando López, Carla Macchiavello, Walter D. Mignolo, Rachel O’Reilly, and Ruth Simbao; and dialogues with the aforementioned and Jennifer Biddle, Katherine Carl, Fernando do Campo, Chandra Frank, Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Angela Mitropoulos, James Nguyen, Salote Tawale, and Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi.
Speaker biographies:
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.
Sebastian Henry-Jones’ curatorial approach is led by an interest in DIY thinking and situated in the context of the gentrification of Sydney and Melbourne’s cultural landscapes. Seb is the Curator at West Space.
Lana Nguyen currently practices as an independent producer, curator and collaborator on projects that stem from the politics of place and collective processes. Interested in experimental, live and public art, she has worked across the small to medium contemporary sector and has recently focused on projects of institutional advocacy and critique, creating spaces for non-hierarchical learning, professional porousness and the climate crisis.
Lucreccia Quintanilla is a multidisciplinary artist and Co-Director of Liquid Architecture. She has recently completed her Doctoral research titled: Whose Myth? The Echo and the Diaspora, at Monash University. Recent written works include: Brian Fuata, A Generous Opacity, for the Anti LIVE Art International Award publication, Finland; Records of Displacement in Disclaimer online Journal; and Speaking Surfaces, St Paul’s gallery, Auckland University of
Technology. Quintanilla’s work is concerned with sound and the collective.
Born in Vietnam and based in Naarm/Melbourne, James Nguyen’s interdisciplinary practice examines strategies of decolonisation, while also interrogating the politics of family history, language, displacement and diaspora.
