Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor (23 October 1963 – 15 March 2019) was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, academic administrator, and educator, specializing in art history. Enwezor served as artistic director of several major exhibitions, including Documenta11 (2002) and the 2015 Venice Biennale, becoming the first non-European and African-born curator to lead both. He was director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst from 2011 to 2018. Enwezor was also the founding editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and held numerous academic appointments. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the ArtReview list of the 100 most powerful people of the art world. He lived in New York City and Munich. Enwezor died in 2019 after a prolonged battle with cancer. Quotes I have always worked against the notion of a “center” and a “periphery” to which certain critical ideas, practices or persons can be consigned or defined. Today, this is even less acceptable, especially as institutional borders maintaining such separations erode and crumble, and new concepts of sovereignty, agency, and subjectivity emerge that insist on the articulation of a global ethics for engaging with the residual effects of imperial hegemony. Therefore, accepting such a Manichean scheme as a predetermination for intellectual, artistic, or cultural production and their circuits of dissemination, historicization, reception, etc. erodes the subjective claims made through decolonization and de-apartheidization. Okwui interview response 'How forceful or useful is that argument today?' “The Short Century” is the most important curatorial project I have undertaken, as well as the most complicated, emotionally and intellectually. It is equally one of the most satisfying and conflicted. Many moments in its research were difficult to accept, such as the relative paucity of archives of the period available in Africa. And where such archives do exist, the holdings could best be described as endangered. So here we have a project celebrating monumental achievements, yet also seeming to be an autopsy of the postcolonial state’s body. The disappearance of the historical patrimony of twentieth century Africa is a project I would like to pursue in the future. There is a clear need to establish a fully equipped research center for the proper study of decolonization in Africa. So there was a constant relay between different modes of being. Okwui interview response '“The Short Century” is arguably your must significant curatorial project to date. Why was it important that the show toured major venues in Germany and the USA?' One temptation with an exhibition of this nature is to try to be all things to all people. Of course, African American and Caribbean intellectuals and artists were very important and active interlocutors of the decolonization struggle: intellectuals like George Padmore, W.E.B. Dubois and Langston Hughes; artists like Jacob Lawrence and Dennis William who worked briefly in Nigeria in the early sixties; and statesmen such as Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King who represented the United States along with the then vice president Nixon at Ghana’s independence ceremony in 1957. The Harlem Renaissance writers clearly influenced the Negritude writers, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Cesaire. All these are important artistic and intellectual histories. But the exhibition focused on the idea that the study of the decolonization was premised through a historical optics of African agency. It is not a question of essentialism, but articulating this agency required a rigoruous ground from which to understand what was at stake in the founding moments of the postcolonial consciousness. The number of Europeans in the shows has a clear ongoing historical relationship to the subject of African aesthetics and is not presented unproblematically. Okwui interview response 'A few weeks ago, a curator based in Atlanta wondered why there were no African-American artists in “The Short Century” given that, as he said, they were also sympathetic to African decolonization, as were some of the Europeans in the show.' External links Okwui Enwezor Category:1963 births Category:2019 deaths Category:Philosophers Category:Socialists from Africa Category:Revolutionaries Category:Pan-Africanists Category:Art critics Category:Curators Category:Writers Category:Art historians