Okwui Enwezor

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Okwui Enwezor. Okwui Enwezor (1963 –2019) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00375/1754372/octo_a_00375.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021

PAMELA M. LEE

In 2019, mention of the “global art world” and its thematic cognates—glob - alism and “global contemporary” art among them—is likely to inspire more cyni - cism than excitement. Critics have their reasons. The phenomenon of global contemporary art seems a foregone conclusion at this late date, the ubiquity of its biennials and fairs inversely proportional to the size of the art world’s most privileged demographic. That such art may be du jour among the collecting class—the stuff of oligarchic portfolios, vanity museums, and private founda - tions—is wholly consistent with the lengthening itineraries of finance capital. If the “global art world” was ideally premised on the rejection of Euro-American parochialisms, an expansion of hemispheric perspectives, and the rewriting of art-historical canons, the hegemony of such markets effectively reproduces the most entrenched relations of power. The passing of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), the most influential curator of the past quarter-century, challenges us to revisit these conventions and nuance their historiography in turn, for Enwezor repeatedly identified the contradictory prospects of this emergent global art world. Over the course of a pathbreaking career, the rhetoric of antinomies structured his critical and curatorial engage - ments, whether addressing the afterlives of African independence movements, the transnational biennial as an exhibition model, or the rise of global networks and postcolonial constellations, necessarily uneven in their distribution among diverse populations and actors. Among his many roles—as a founding co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art , for instance, or as the recent director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst—Enwezor is best remembered as the first non-European director to helm Documenta in 2002, widely heralded as the first “global” iteration of the quinquennial exhibition. “Documenta 11,” Enwezor wrote, “rests on five platforms which aim to describe the present location of culture and its interfaces with other complex, global knowledge systems.” Several years in advance of the exhibition, the Nigerian-born Enwezor and an international team of curators staged these “platforms”—transdisciplinary symposia featuring artists, scholars, and activists—in Lagos, New Delhi, St. Lucia, Vienna, and Berlin. The transforma - tive impact of such efforts, broadening the purview of contemporary art and sur - facing art’s colonial inheritance, cannot be overstated.

In honoring Enwezor’s legacy, we might consider an earlier moment in his trajectory, when the rituals of the global art world were far from prescribed and the iconography of globalism had yet to harden into a period style. Recounting his experience as the director of the second Johannesburg Biennial, titled Trade Routes: History and Geography (1997), Enwezor described his charge in patently opti - mistic terms. “1997 was an incredible moment of hope, of excitement, and many Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00375/1754372/octo_a_00375.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 of us didn’t know what we were doing,” he noted, but we had intuition and a sense of what the biennale needed to be. It needed to be about South Africa in the world, and Africa in the world—renouncing parochialism. The attempt to realise the event as a meeting of worlds meant we had to bring the best of the world. 1 The statement attests to an almost ad hoc approach (or at least attitude) to orga - nizing what was then a singular cultural event, one of a handful of international biennials that included Venice, Dakar, São Paulo, and Havana. The anticipatory tenor of Enwezor’s recollection and the language of “hope” and “excitement” were continuous with the end of apartheid only a few years earlier. In collabora - tion with seven other curators from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States, Enwezor assembled a group of artists whose names are now synonymous with global contemporary art, including Ghada Amer, Tania Bruguera, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Gu Wenda, Yinka Shonibare, and Vivan Sundaram. From a distance, Trade Routes might well seem to have launched an inex - orable, too-pat narrative of art and globalization in which a demiurgic curator arrives on the scene and inaugurates a paradigm shift in contemporary art. Enwezor’s thinking on such curatorial gestures, by contrast, internalized what he called the “contingent histories” of globalization: that dispossession and transfor - mation were twinned processes in this regard, and that the art world effectively crystallized such processes, for good or for ill. To be sure, the response to Trade Routes was not without controversy. 2 Its reception would precipitate a number of themes that emerged in the culture of biennials and the criticism of “global con - temporary” art over the past twenty years. The early closure of the biennial due to a withdrawal of funds by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council drama - tized the internecine battles waged between regional politicians and a consortium of international curators. South African viewers chastised the directorship as mar - ginalizing local communities, while the curatorial team variously returned charges of xenophobia to their South African hosts.

1. Okwui Enwezor, “Reflections: Artistic Director,” in Trade Routes Revisited: A Project Marking the 15th Anniversary of the Second Johannesburg Biennale , ed. Joost Bosland (Cape Town: Stevenson, 2012), p. 11. 2. On the history of the biennial and its controversy, see Joost Bosland, “Introduction,” in Bosland, Trade Routes Revisited , pp. 7–11. Okwui Enwezor 151

Recounting this episode from the beginning of Enwezor’s career might seem a dissonant testimony to his contribution. On the contrary, it is to highlight the monumental challenges, complexity, and ambition of his endeavors: to bring con - temporary art into greater contact with the larger social relation at a pivotal, if nec - essarily qualified, moment in African history and neoliberal globalization.

Enwezor’s principled approach to contemporary art simultaneously expanded and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00375/1754372/octo_a_00375.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 troubled the art world’s very terms—an art world that he was in part formative, indeed singular, in creating.