South Americans show off their dark artistic side in new Cape Town exhibition

Colour is integral to the creative cultures of Latin America, be it Peruvian textiles, urban graffiti in Brazil, Cuban oppositional politics, or even Colombian fiction.

It may come as a surprise then that the dominant colour of 'Let Me Begin Again', the Goodman Gallery's exhibition of young Latin American artists, is stubbornly black.

The colour is a constant in the paintings, sculptural installations, photographs and video installations, which were selected by curators Lara Koseff and Renato Silva.

Koseff, a curator at the Goodman Gallery, met Silva, a director at the São Paulo art dealership Mendes Wood, in 2015 when they assisted curator Carolyn Drake on the inaugural version of the Goodman Gallery's exhibition series South-South.

The project series aims to create horizontal dialogue between artists from Africa and Latin America. The current exhibition, at Goodman Gallery's Cape Town premises, is comprised of 23 artists from Angola, Brazil, Cuba, Mozambique, Portugal and South Africa.

When Koseff and Silva were tapped to supervise the second instalment, their wish list included Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles and Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros. They managed to score one out of two, Let Me Begin Again including a remarkable work by Los Carpinteros.

Founded in the early 1990s by three friends, Los Carpinteros is made up of Dagoberto Rodríguez and Marco Castillo. They are represented on Let Me Begin Again by a video documenting an eccentric street parade they choreographed for the 2012 Havana Biennial.

Conga Irreversible (2012) shows a Cuban conga troupe - singers, musicians and dancers - performing a joyous public dance along Havana's Paseo del Prado. The first thing one notices is that all the performers are in black, including their face paint.

"It was important for them to strip away the colour from the conga so that immediately your eyes are drawn to the fact that something is off - everything is happening in reverse," explained Koseff.

And really, everything is in reverse: the footwork, the singing, the playing. It may sound silly in words, but the performance is a remarkable feat, joyous to watch.

Los Carpinteros, with Tracey Rose and Kendell Geers, are this show's big hitters.

Rose, who had a run of important shows in Europe last year, is represented here by her black and white photograph The Kiss (2001). It shows Rose seated on the lap of her former New York dealer Christian Haye, about to kiss him. Both are naked. The Kiss remains a visceral and seductive work, effortlessly contemporary.

Among the younger generation is Gustavo Speridião from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is represented by three large paintings, two of which are on view in the main gallery. Collectively titled Russian Landscape (2014), in deference to painter Kazimir Malevich's iconic 1915 painting Black Square, one of Speridião's paintings is totally black, the other seemingly on its way to that end.

Two other first-time visitors are Cuban artist Elizabet Cerviño and Brazilian artist Flávio Cerqueira.

"History suffocates me," observed Cerqueira on the meaning of his sculptural installation I Told You (2016), a heap of South African history books with a pair of bronze legs poking out one side. "They're casts of my body. The work is about my experience of being oppressed by history."

Cerqueira's mixed-race heritage, which includes Portuguese, African and Brazilian Indian ancestors, forms a sub-plot on a show about fluid post-colonial identities.

Cerviño's contribution includes four rectangular sculptures made from raw wax. She also staged a performance at the exhibition's opening, ritualistically emptying the water out of 60 silver buckets against a pile of earth for Exile.

• South-South: Let Me Begin Again is at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town until March 4.

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• This article was originally published in The Times.