Southern Discomfort

A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the 'Global South'. But what does that mean? And is the term of any practical use?

- Oliver Basciano

The first Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951, was the product of the USA’s dominance in the postwar world. It was organised by the Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP), the institution itself founded just five years earlier by industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo in close conversation with his friend Nelson Rockefeller. The latter, by then heading a cultural division of the American government, and with close ties to the CIA, had already helped fill MASP with work by artists labelled ‘new Americans’ and ‘Europeans in Exile’. The biennial was Matarazzo and Rockefeller’s next big soft-power project aimed squarely against the spectre of communism.

Over 70 years later, the 35th edition of the Bienal promises to be an altogether different affair, looking instead, the curators say, to artists from the ‘Global South’. In that, the Bienal curators are not alone: Videobrasil, a biennial survey of (primarily) moving image, which will open in October, has used the term in its artist-selection criteria since the São Paulo-based festival’s inception, in 1991. Raphael Fonseca, who is cocurating Videobrasil, calls the Global South “a fictional idea of community, knowledge and creators that can contrast with the hegemonic North”, useful even in its construction.