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This call is for visual artists and poets to explore the theme of labor and its material traces, drawing inspiration from Lucille Clifton's poem 'defending my tongue'.
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Get matched →South South is a curatorial initiative launched in 2015 to foster exchange across the Global South, now continuing as a quarterly online programme connecting artists across the Global Majority. The current exhibition 'the dirt the tree the land' is curated by Dr Zoé Whitley and features eight international artists who variously explore the spectre of labour over and throughout our creative lives.
'the dirt the tree the land' is a collective exploration of the material traces left by physical toil. Hard graft roots our connectedness to places that both sustain and strain us. Clifton's poem uses her signature lower case spelling and distinctive spacing between words to establish a bittersweet pace and mood. Our mother tongues and the physical materials present in our upbringing form our identity; they tie us to fundamental understandings of ourselves in the world. We learn to recount not only through but beyond words, to our landscape and to our soil.
Dr. Zoé Whitley is an internationally acclaimed curator, art historian, and cultural leader based in London. She has held senior curatorial roles at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Hayward Gallery, and served as Director of Chisenhale Gallery. Her notable projects include co-curating Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017) and curating the British Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Whitley was appointed an Honorary OBE in 2025 for services to art.
Centenarian Betye Saar speaks through the transformation of found objects about the back-breaking domestic work of Black women. Tumelo Mtimkhulu offers a sincere homage to unseen acts of cleaning and chores. Ravelle Pillay uses paint to recreate the afterlives of indentured labour. Bulumko Mbete honors women's indigenous traditions. Tonico Lemos Auad foregrounds the painstaking labour of weaving. Vibha Galhotra transforms found materials into repositories of ecological reflection. Grace Ndiritu expands the notion of labour into the collective work of healing. Juliana dos Santos embraces the slow, organic processes of botanical pigments to reveal painting as an act of reverence.
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