LONDON.- Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, a major exhibition from the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, opens at the South London Gallery (SLG) on 10 June 2016.

Offering incredible insight into contemporary art practice from a range of artists, Under the Same Sun examines a diversity of creative responses by artists to complex, shared realities. The exhibition focuses on work made by artists born after 1968, in addition to several early pioneers who were active internationally in the 1960s and ’70s, many of whom have been influenced by shared colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, social inequality, and concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress.

Following two years in residency, the exhibition has been organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, in collaboration with the team at the South London Gallery. Under the Same Sun will be the first to be housed in both the SLG’s main site and the ground floor of its new building, a neighbouring former Fire Station currently under restoration. Due to open fully in 2018, the Fire Station will be a major new cultural offer for contemporary art in London. The Under the Same Sun exhibition premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in June 2014 and was then shown at Museo Jumex, Mexico City’s newest museum of contemporary art, from November 2015 to February 2016. This is its only showing outside of the Americas.

As part of a long term collaboration with UBS, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative (MAP) will add more than 125 new works from over 85 artists to the Guggenheim's collection under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund, signalling an unprecedented level of growth and diversity for the museum. Launched in 2012, MAP is a cornerstone of the Guggenheim’s initiatives to work with artists, scholars, and curators from around the world to bring intersecting regional and global histories of modernism and contemporary practices to the fore.

Featured works and artists include:

Alfredo Jaar’s renowned work, A Logo for America, involving an electronic billboard displaying the statement, “This is Not America”, emblazoned across an outline map of the USA. The Chilean-born artist’s multidisciplinary artistic practice explores the unequal power relations and sociopolitical divisions that result from globalization.

Amalia Pica uses sculpture, performance, installation and photography to explore the nuances of communication. Her 2013 work A ∩ B ∩ C (read as A intersection B intersection C) references the fact that, during the 1970s, Argentina’s military junta forbade Venn diagrams and the related concept of intersection from being taught in elementary schools, viewing it as potentially subversive. In A ∩ B ∩ C, performers manipulate translucent coloured shapes, producing configurations that use intersection as an invitation to reimagine collaboration and community. Returned to the walls at the performance’s conclusion, the shapes seemed endowed with a new communicative potential.

Berlin-based Mariana Castillo Deball uses installation, sculpture, photography, and drawing to explore the role objects play in our understanding of identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods of research and field work, she takes on the role of the explorer or the archaeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. In Castillo Deball’s 2013 work Stelae Storage, plaster casts copied from monolithic Mayan stone sculptures called stelae are displayed on metal racks similar to those found in the British Museum’s storage area. In a similar work, Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi (2013), Castillo Deball culled photographic reproductions from the personal archives of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who mixed pop and ethnographic references.

Wilfredo Prieto, originally from Cuba, lives and works in Havana and Barcelona. He employs a strategically restricted range of materials in concert with a sharp sense of humour, making conscious and pointed use of comedy to satirical ends. Walk was made during his first trip outside Cuba for a residency on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, where the artist put a plant in a wheelbarrow filled with soil and took it on a five-kilometre walking tour.

Gabriel Sierra lives and works in Bogotá. Employing the languages of design and architecture, the Colombian artist’s work challenges the rules of functionality and engages ideas of community, habitat, and urbanism. Hang It All, alludes to Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic coatrack. Sierra has stuck various pieces of fruit onto the prongs of a wall-mounted coatrack, thus replacing perfect geometric form with irregular organic matter.

Raimond Chaves and Gilda Mantilla are life partners and artistic collaborators who also maintain solo careers. Their joint undertakings offer an alternative to stereotypical views of Latin America’s landscapes and cultures by focusing on overlooked details of its peoples and places. Chaves and Mantilla’s two works in the Guggenheim’s collection are culled from their research at the Library of the Centre for Theological Studies of the Amazon and the Library of the Research Institute of the Peruvian Amazon in Iquitos, Peru—a locus of debate around Amazonian identity. An Uncomfortable Eagerness (Un afán incómodo, 2011) is a collection of texts and images sourced from documents unearthed during their research. The other work, Carbon Copy Jungle (2011), is an encyclopaedic grid of drawings that refers to anthropological sketching expeditions.

Federico Herrero’s practice stands outside Latin America’s traditions of conceptualism, muralist, and geometric abstraction, yet his work references all of these styles. The Costa Rican artist will present Pan de Azúcar, titled after Rio de Janeiro’s iconic peak. The work depicts a towering black monolith, which rises in a composition that captures, in the artist’s words, “the soul of the mountain”.

Wilson Díaz’s practice encompasses music, painting, performance, photography, and video. The Colombian artist’s oeuvre is unified by his commitment to exploring the roots of conflict and corruption in his native country. The neon sculpture Movement of the Liberation of the Coca Plant (2012/14) represents the search for an alternative to the nexus of narcotraffic and insurgency that has shaped life in contemporary Colombia.

Other participating artists include: Carlos Amorales, Tania Bruguera, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Rafael Ferrer, Runo Lagomarsino, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.

On their first major collaboration with a UK institution, Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said, “With a longstanding commitment to working directly with artists as well as a history of dynamic international programming, the South London Gallery is an ideal collaborator for the UK presentation of our reflections on contemporary art in Latin America. Their deep connection to their local community, which also includes one of the largest Latin American populations in Europe, is particularly well suited to the ambitions of MAP, which is rooted in our desire to create a 21st-century museum that reflects the world it inhabits. We are especially delighted that our collaboration on this iteration of Under the Same Sun will progress plans for the former Peckham Road Fire Station, the South London Gallery’s new space.”



The exhibition is the result of an in-depth curatorial residency with the Guggenheim by Pablo León de la Barra, who said, “Under the Same Sun is the product of extensive research across Latin America, and brings artists of different generations into dialogue. Latin American countries share common histories of authoritarian regimes, economic crisis, and social uprisings, but there hasn't been enough dialogue about these shared experiences. With this project we hope to expand this network of dialogue and knowledge. The MAP initiative as a whole acknowledges the existence of multiple artistic hubs throughout the world; through connecting and giving visibility to the artistic production of these different contexts, we expand the understanding of the complex realities we inhabit.”

Margot Heller, Director of the South London Gallery said, “This is an exceptional opportunity for the SLG to present an exhibition of this scale and quality, but which also has such direct relevance to an important sector of our local community. This will be the largest group show we’ve ever presented, spanning all the spaces in our main site, the ground floor of the former Peckham Road Fire Station, as well as off-site projects in the surrounding area. It will give a taste of what will be possible when we expand into the renovated Fire Station in 2018, when partnership working will be at the heart of our approach to programming, underpinned by a commitment to working with local residents. We are delighted to be working with the Guggenheim and Pablo León de la Barra on this exciting collaboration.”

“The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative helps provide a holistic view of some of the world's most dynamic and fast-changing regions,” says CEO, UBS Wealth Management Jürg Zeltner. “With this collaboration we align a global, cultural perspective with our business approach and experience in the emerging markets.”