A Curatorial Reflection: Resonance of the South: Memory, Identity and the Right to Imagine the Future

The curatorial process began with the conceptual framework of the Global South and with a desire to understand the term beyond its geographical meaning. I approached it through questions of colonialism, unequal global structures, economic dependency, migration, cultural and political autonomy, memory, identity, belonging, heritage, displacement, transformation and the possibility of imagining the future differently.

These concepts became the threads through which I began to construct the exhibition.

Rather than presenting a single narrative of the Global South, I wanted to create a fabric of different stories—stories that emerge through distinct artistic languages but are connected by the ways artists experience, question and transform their contemporary realities.

At the heart of this curatorial dialogue is a fundamental question: How do we reclaim the right to tell our own stories, preserve our memories and imagine our futures on our own terms?

A South–South Dialogue

The dialogue between Latin America and the Middle East is particularly significant today because it challenges traditional Eurocentric narratives and positions the Global South not as a passive periphery, but as a dynamic centre of thought, resistance and cultural production.

By bringing realities from Bogotá to Dubai into conversation, Resonance of the South seeks to demonstrate that, despite geographical distance, these regions share historical experiences, structural challenges and, above all, a common urgency to imagine the future through their own perspectives.

One of the most important dimensions of this dialogue is the decolonisation of the global narrative.

Both Latin America and the Middle East have been profoundly shaped by colonial histories and unequal global structures imposed or reinforced by the Global North. For decades, contemporary art has often been validated through institutions and cultural capitals such as New York, London and Paris.

A South–South dialogue offers another possibility.

It allows artists and cultural voices from Latin America and the Middle East to look toward one another without requiring a Western intermediary to validate their histories. It creates a direct exchange in which different experiences can meet on equal terms.

The exhibition therefore becomes not simply a geographical connection between Bogotá and Dubai, but a cultural and intellectual bridge.

Memory, Displacement and Belonging

Another important connection lies in the shared experiences of dependency, geopolitical instability, migration and displacement that have shaped many communities across both regions.

Within this context, memory becomes more than an archive of the past. It becomes a way of maintaining belonging.

The artistic languages emerging from Bogotá, including those represented through institutions such as Casa Museo Enrique Grau and Museo Édgar Negret, carry histories of identity, heritage and cultural memory. In Dubai, meanwhile, the encounter takes place within one of the world's most globally connected cultural and technological environments.

Dubai becomes a meeting point—a place where stories shaped by displacement, migration and cultural exchange can encounter new audiences and new networks.

This is particularly relevant because displacement does not necessarily mean the loss of identity. Sometimes, displacement intensifies the need to understand where we come from.

It can transform memory into an active form of resistance.

Cultural Autonomy in a Globalised World

The struggle for cultural autonomy is also reflected in the ways artists from the Global South interpret their contemporary realities.

These artists do not simply document trauma or reproduce histories of marginalisation. They transform experience through their own visual, material and conceptual languages. In doing so, they defend their right to complexity.

This is important because cultural production from the Global South has too often been reduced to the exotic, the folkloric or the political.

Resonance of the South seeks another reading.

It recognises the sophistication, conceptual depth and aesthetic richness of these artistic practices while allowing each artist to speak from their own context.

The objective is not to create a single definition of the Global South, but to reveal the many ways in which it thinks, remembers, transforms and creates.

Edgar Negret and Ghada Khunji: Two Languages of Memory

At the centre of this curatorial dialogue is a particularly meaningful connection between Edgar Negret and Ghada Khunji.

Although their practices emerge from different generations, countries and artistic contexts, both artists engage deeply with questions of memory, identity and belonging.

Their work demonstrates how fragments of the past can be reassembled through artistic practice to construct new ways of understanding who we are.

In Negret's sculptures, geometry becomes a language through which ancestral memory can be transformed into contemporary form. His use of metal, visible joints, structures and repeated elements does not conceal the process of construction. Instead, the mechanisms remain present.

The sculpture reminds us that memory itself is constructed—that cultural identity is continually assembled, dismantled and reconstructed.

Negret's engagement with ancestral references, including Andean and Indigenous traditions, allows geometry to become more than an abstract formal language. It becomes a way of monumentalising an invisible heritage.

Ghada Khunji approaches memory from another direction.

Through photography, surrealist photomontage and the incorporation of personal and family materials, she explores identity, migration and displacement. In works such as Baba & Mami, clothing and textiles from her own family become fragments through which memory can be reconstructed.

The fragment, the seam and the layering of images become poetic methods of assembling an identity shaped by migration and distance from her native Bahrain.

In this sense, the work of Khunji and Negret begins to speak to one another.

Where Negret constructs through metal, structure and geometry, Khunji constructs through photography, textiles, personal archives and the body.

Both transform fragments into new structures of belonging.

Geometry, Symbol and Belonging

Another point of connection is the use of symbolism as a language of identity.

Negret moved away from Western realism toward geometric abstraction, drawing from ancestral and Indigenous references to create works that carry spiritual and cultural meaning. His Aparatos Mágicos and Vigilantes, for example, demonstrate how geometry can become a vessel for memory.

Khunji similarly develops a symbolic visual language rooted in the cultural landscape of the Gulf, drawing from the desert, religious iconography, the female body and personal heritage.

In her FaRIDA series, for instance, the figure of Frida Kahlo is reinterpreted through a distinctly Gulf perspective. Western symbols are replaced or transformed through elements such as Arabic falcons and family relics.

The result is not an imitation of an existing cultural narrative, but its reconfiguration.

The personal becomes political. Heritage becomes contemporary. Displacement becomes a source of visual strength.

The Journey Away and the Return Within

Both artists also experienced the movement of cultural and artistic migration.

Negret lived and exhibited in international artistic centres such as New York and Paris. Khunji developed her documentary practice within New York's demanding artistic environment before returning to Bahrain.

Yet their international experiences did not simply lead to assimilation into the dominant cultural canon.

Instead, distance activated a deeper need to look inward.

The experience of moving between cultures can create an intensified awareness of heritage. The further one travels from one's point of origin, the more urgently questions of identity, memory and belonging can emerge.

This is a recurring experience within diasporic communities across the Global South.

Migration can create rupture, but it can also create new forms of cultural consciousness.

A Living Memory

This is where the dialogue between Negret, Khunji and the contemporary voices of the Global South becomes particularly relevant.

Within Niotah's digital ecosystem in Dubai, these stories encounter a new territory—one that is not defined by physical borders.

Digital platforms can become spaces of cultural exchange, visibility and collective memory. They can connect Bogotá and Dubai, Latin America and the Middle East, established artistic legacies and emerging voices.

The artists of the Global South are no longer simply asking to be included within an existing narrative.

They are contributing to the construction of new narratives themselves.

Their histories are made of fragments, migrations, memories, wounds, transformations and acts of reconstruction.

This is why the dialogue between Negret, Khunji and contemporary artists is so important to Resonance of the South.

Their work demonstrates that the artistic languages of the Global South are not merely echoes of Western modernity. They emerge from their own histories, symbols, materials, territories and ways of seeing.

They constitute their own aesthetic technologies.

From Memory to the Future

Ultimately, Resonance of the South is not an exhibition about looking backwards.

It is about understanding how memory can become a tool for imagining what comes next.

Memory is not a static relic preserved inside a museum. It is alive.

It can be assembled, dismantled, photographed, stitched, transformed and projected into the future.

Perhaps this is the deepest resonance connecting the works presented in this exhibition: the understanding that identity is not fixed, and that heritage is not something we simply inherit.

We continuously reconstruct it.

From Bogotá to Dubai, from Latin America to the Middle East, Resonance of the South proposes a space where these histories can meet, speak to one another and create new possibilities.

The Global South is not waiting to be defined from elsewhere.

It is remembering, creating and imagining its future in its own voice.

Artwork

Title: Sol Rojo (Red Sun)

Artist: Edgar Negret 1995