The Cuban activist-artist Tania Bruguera plans to take up residence at the South London Gallery in Camberwell this year, as part of a collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The residency is one of several projects being developed in conjunction with the Guggenheim’s travelling exhibition Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, which is due to open at the London gallery—including its new space, a former fire station—on 13 June (until 1 October).
“We are talking to Bruguera about doing a residency and a new project,” says the Guggenheim UBS Map curator Pablo León de la Barra, who is organising the show of around 40 Latin American artists predominantly born after 1968. They include Carlos Amorales, Alfredo Jaar and Rivane Neuenschwander, who have all exhibited at the gallery before.
The Guggenheim exhibition will be the first at the Peckham Road Fire Station, which was donated to the South London Gallery anonymously last September. The four-storey fire station is scheduled to open fully in 2018, and parts of the show will be installed on the ground floor, which is currently “in a rough and ready state”, says Margot Heller, the institution’s director. The publicly funded gallery aims to raise £4m to pay for the refurbishment and some operating costs.
De la Barra, who organised previous incarnations of Under the Same Sun at the Guggenheim in New York in 2014 and at the Museo Júmex in Mexico City last year, says that it is a “great opportunity” to be the first to exhibit at the fire station, adding that the South London Gallery is a natural fit for the Guggenheim. “The art scene is really happening in that part of south London right now,” he says. “It’s also a traditional neighbourhood for immigrants, and there’s a big Latin American population in nearby Elephant and Castle.”
For Mexico City-born De la Barra, it is also a homecoming of sorts. “I lived in London for 15 years and became a British citizen,” he says. “South London still feels like the London I knew and loved.”