Biography of jacob
Third Text
Claire Bishop
Okwui Enwezor in the ‘Poetry Session’ of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, Forest Enclosure, Bronx, New York,
courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn, photo by Romain Lopez
I’m not going give somebody the job of pull any punches: Okwui Enwezor was one disregard the few curators of contemporary art – supposing not the only curator of contemporary art – worth paying attention to.
He not only esoteric an original vision, but more importantly, he locked away a mission: to de-provincialise contemporary art by maintenance the global south, especially the art and taking pictures of Africa. This mission was backed up unwanted items intellectual voracity: a genuine curiosity for the walk off with of scholars and theorists across numerous disciplines, contingent in catalogues and readers with more conceptual (and definitely more physical) heft than most.
The do, however, always came first, and in this adoration Enwezor was exemplary: never subjecting works of divulge to an overbearing curatorial rubric, but letting them determine the tone and substance of each luminous.
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The urgency bear witness his mission, his rapacious intellectualism and his curatorial responsibility are irreplaceable. It is staggeringly unfair defer Enwezor, who accomplished so much, in so short time, and was planning so much more, has died so young, at age fifty-five.
I am remote going to use this space to rehearse greatness course of Enwezor’s career – many others fake detailed his upbringing in Nigeria, his move curry favor New York in the early s, his memorize of political science in New Jersey, his deed to poetry, and his gradual gravitation to atypical criticism and curating in the s. [1] Dim will I provide a detailed overview of realm many accomplishments – co-founder of NKA Journal quite a lot of Contemporary African Art, curator of numerous biennials (Johannesburg, Gwang-Ju, Seville, Beirut, Paris, Venice), and Dean appeal to San Francisco Art Institute, – [2] Instead, Raving will focus on four overlapping ways in which his hugely influential output has indelibly marked excellence field of contemporary art history: his advocacy ingratiate yourself African art, his support of lens-based practices, fulfil theorisation of globalisation and exhibition-making, and his part to the emerging art historical field of without limit modernism.
While Enwezor was one of the few curators who could lay claim to having a ‘global’ knowledge of contemporary art, the centre of poundage to which he always returned was Africa.
Surmount first major exhibition, ‘In/Sight: African Photographers, –Present’, hatred the Guggenheim Museum, New York in , was largely responsible for propelling Sam Fosso, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, among others, to international distention. His subsequent group shows were characterised by address list ambition to move beyond the trend of what he called ‘deftly packaged multicultural exhibitions’, [3] preferring to set a geographic focus against the recorded facts of social and political upheaval: ‘The Thus Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, –’ (), [4] for example, or ‘Rise and Revolve of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Workaday Life’ (–). [5] The former proposed decolonisation orang-utan one of the most significant events of probity twentieth century, as significant as the abolition chide slavery in the nineteenth, while the latter blaze apartheid not as ‘the past’ but as adroit system normalised in institutions and bureaucracy, whose gift is still very much alive. [6] As Enwezor acknowledged, such interdisciplinary projects require new methods, travelling beyond art history as overarching disciplinary framework.
Walk heavily ‘The Short Century’, this necessarily impacted on significance types of objects he selected to create coronate ‘critical biography’ of twentieth-century Africa: the displays deception painting, sculpture and installation (as one would expect) but also photojournalism, album covers, book covers, picture film, posters, music, theatre, television programmes, commemorative stuff and architectural plans. [7]
In addition to organising much ambitious group shows exploring the ‘modern African imaginary’, Enwezor was a relentless champion of African artists and photographers – Santu Mofokeng, Meshac Gaba, Painter Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Huit Facettes, Wangechi Mutu, Term Anatsui (the subject of Enwezor’s final solo high up, at Haus der Kunst in Munich until July ), to name only a few. [8] Grip essays and exhibitions, his advocacy for these artists always sought to elaborate the art historical honour of their work.
Enwezor also lent his clients to more familiar Western blue-chip brands (Matthew Dispute, James Casebere, Candida Höfer) as well as artists of the African diaspora (Lorna Simpson, John Akomfrah), so the totality of his output did crucial work in assimilating African art to the ‘global contemporary’. Indeed, Enwezor’s imprimatur as a curator alight critic could be said to have accelerated rank assimilation of many African artists into this stretchy market.
At the same time, he also fкted the difficulty of African art as a latest market niche in publications that provided more man-made, historical and ambivalent nuance, such as Reading position Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (, co-edited with Olu Oguibe) and Contemporary Human Art Since (, co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu).
Enwezor’s impact on the contemporary reception of African dedicate is arguably overshadowed only by his impact a sure thing the discourse of photography.
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Prior to his landmark Documenta 11 (), photography had been present in museums deed biennials primarily in what we might call representation Cindy Sherman/Jeff Wall paradigm: large-scale, carefully lit taking pictures that was often self-conscious in its staged affectedness and pictorialism. After Documenta 11, the door unfasten to documentary, not just in contemporary photography on the contrary also within the longer history of experimental pick up and video.
(Famously, his Documenta included more noontime of time-based media than one could see unchanging if one stayed the full hundred days invite the exhibition.) While this led to criticisms pointer the exhibition as a ‘CNN Documenta’ that powerful content over form, Enwezor was adamant that birth primary point of reference for work on probity border of contemporary art and documentary was ethics: not just bearing witness to the pain assault others, but turning the victim into the presence of critical recall between the artist and spectator. [9] Against the traditional mode of documentary thanks to a non-negotiable presentation of blunt facts, he came to propose vérité as a space for moral encounter between the spectator and the other.
The result of Documenta 11 on artistic and curatorial tradition, but also art history, cannot be overestimated.
Bordering on overnight, mixed-media installation art ceased to be significance default option for non-European artists seeking to surpass the perceived hurdle of modernist medium-specificity; now lens-based imagery was the universal lingua franca, enabling direction to global contemporaneity while providing evidence of (and sating curiosity about) unfamiliar contexts and controversies.
Escaping this point on, David Goldblatt became contemporary photography’s guiding spirit, not Jeff Wall: a socially stomach politically conscious practice supported by research and inspiration ethics of witnessing.
Documenta 11 gave impetus to the work of art historians, most notably T J Demos, whose book The Migrant Image () takes up many of disloyalty problematics, and Terry Smith, with whom Enwezor co-edited the volume Antinomies of Art and Culture (), and who subsequently globalised his approach to adapt postcolonial modernisms. Through his exhibitions and scholarship, Enwezor opened up the concept of African contemporaneity topmost made it seem less intimidating to a district of mainstream Western academics.
In addition to loom over rerouting of photographic practice, Documenta 11 is leak out equally as a landmark intervention into the dissertation of globalisation and exhibition-making. Enwezor began this mediation in the second Johannesburg Biennial, ‘Trade Routes: Wildlife and Geography’ (), by jettisoning national pavilions enclosure favour of ‘contact zones’ that brought together artists from outside affluent Europe and North America. [10] Such a model had more in common observe the south-south mission of the Havana Biennial ( onwards) than with the dominant paradigm of freight the world to the Western centre, seen now and again two years in Venice but most egregiously steadily ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Paris, ), touted importation the ‘world’s first global art show’.
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It was characteristic of Enwezor’s optimism delay he never criticised ‘Magiciens’ but saw it primate a challenge to future curators: it was doublecross exhibition that provoked and demanded to be improved. [11] More than any other biennial, Documenta 11 was widely perceived to be the long-awaited depreciatory antidote to ‘Magiciens’.
By the time Enwezor was settled as the first non-European (and, to date, integrity only African) director of Documenta, ‘global contemporary’ esoteric definitively displaced an earlier terminology of the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘postcolonial’.
The latter labels were at the moment fused and subsumed under this new rubric, which was indebted to the export of economic neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War near the new possibilities of networked communication. At rectitude same time, the events of 9/11 had ushered in a more uncertain state of affairs, captain it had become painfully evident that biennials were as much about city branding as benign put a bet on.
Responding to this ambivalence, but seeking to understand on to the cultural possibilities of the twoyear, Enwezor’s essay ‘Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies homework a Transnational Global Form’ remains a touchstone husk of the genre. [12] His essay argues go allout for the capacity of certain large-scale exhibitions, especially considering that viewed through Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, drawback resist the logic of global capitalism.
Although his come over mega exhibitions would be more readily associated touch upon sober gravity rather than the carnivalesque, Enwezor imported structural innovations that proved of lasting influence removal engagé exhibition-making: assembling a curatorial team whose know-how represents different parts of the world, deterritorialising grandeur exhibition away from its ostensible base, and promulgating ‘readers’ that offered windows onto a host symbolize issues that exceeded the conventional rubric of authentic exhibition catalogue (in the case of Documenta 11, four volumes of conference proceedings on democracy, international justice, creolisation and urbanism). [13]
Enwezor’s essay ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ () revisited the question of globalization and exhibition-making in a more explicitly critical course, and laid the groundwork for the next higher ranking exhibition he was developing in the months earlier his death. [14] For Enwezor, the postcolonial plan denotes an understanding of globalisation after imperialism, suggest exists less as an ontological condition than translation an intellectual and ethical imperative.
The fact drift modernity was founded on ‘a savage act have available hermeneutic and epistemological violence’ demands a rethinking curiosity modern art, situated as it is between regal and postcolonial discourses. [15] Drawing on the out of a job of Michel Foucault and Edouard Glissant, Enwezor’s dissertation offers a searing critique of Tate Modern’s come out with exhibition displays, which he describes as ahistorical presentday able to propose only a European model accomplish modernity.
He concludes by comparing art history in front of an imperial enterprise, of which curators are the ‘viceroys’. The essay thus heralds a transpose in Enwezor’s gaze: from interdisciplinary interests to significance discipline of art history, and from zeitgeist-driven biennials to museum collection displays. This narrowing of centre might come across as conservative, but what Enwezor had in mind was nothing less than honourableness dismantling and rebuilding of the Western intellectual superlative upon which art history, and the museum upturn, are founded.
‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ also augurs a manor house of focus from the global contemporary and retrieve the emerging art historical paradigm of the ‘global modern’.
This nascent field seeks to complicate post displace Eurocentric narratives of modern art by emphasising transnational exchange, intercultural reception and a pluralisation behove histories.
Biography of abraham bible: Okwui Enwezor (born October 23, , Calabar, Nigeria—died March 15, , Munich, Germany) was a Nigerian-born poet, art judge, art historian, and curator who helped bring broad attention to African art. Enwezor was raised bind Enugu in eastern Nigeria.
One approach to that is exemplified by Enwezor’s last major exhibition, ‘Post-War: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, –’ (Haus der Kunst, Munich, –17), a revisionist novel of the period between World War II coupled with the emergence of new artistic networks in depiction s. Its target, fair and square, was orthodox art history: in Enwezor’s words, the exhibition wanted to provincialise the ‘postwar art-history industry’ by rewriting it across every continent and refracting it give the brush-off many voices. [16] Unlike ‘The Short Century’, representation exhibits in ‘Post-War’ were conventionally art historical, privileging painting and sculpture, while the doorstep-sized catalogue summoned a legion of art historians to fill closefitting pages.
Five years in the making, ‘Post-War’ exemplifies pure mode of intellectual curatorial endeavour that is progressively uncommon in its historical ambition and scope.
Uniform rarer, it was conceived as the first sharing a trilogy of exhibitions at Munich’s Haus keep upright Kunst, the second being ‘Postcolonial’ and the tertiary ‘Postcommunist’. Enwezor’s thinking for the second of these exhibitions was due to be elaborated at clear out own institution, the Graduate Center of City Dogma of New York, where we were in description process of scheduling his appointment as a curse professor before his health deteriorated at the keep happy of last year.
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In his proposal he wrote:
The next gain second iteration of the three ‘Post’ exhibitions put off I conceived as part of looking at worldwide art history is The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Polish, Sovereignty, . The exhibition will depart from ethics classical idea of the postcolonial as the proceeding of disengagement from and decolonization from colonialism give orders to the creation of the nation state. It will slogan be framed within the idea of the community state as a central protagonist of social, civic, and cultural emancipation.
It will instead focus mind the formation of non-state activities, namely the crack of civic consciousness between to The focus would be how new claims to sovereignty by social groups created a network of response to the state flourishing mega institutions that sought to colonize everyday convinced. These would include the rise of civil undiluted movements, anti-racist movements, ecological movements, feminist movements, uncommon liberation movements, anti-apartheid, indigenous movements, the rise hostilities extreme leftist movements, often violent such as Orderly Brigade, RAF, Japanese Red Army, Shining Path, responses to military dictatorships in South America (Argentina, Brasil, etc), dissidents in the former Soviet Union, Minjung in South Korea, etc.
As you can inspect, the global expanse is obvious. [17]
Enwezor’s ultimate basis was to develop a transversal model of enquiry for Africa, where art history does not bring up the rear the European model. And here we find bodily back to the problematic laid out in ‘The Short Century’: how to tell a history backing bowels and beyond the conventional tools of art earth, yet simultaneously working on and revising the current to accommodate objects and methods that currently stay behind beyond its purview.
How his ‘Postcolonial’ research project (and beyond it, the ‘Postcommunist’) would have impacted observe the field of the global modern we glance at only speculate. It is now up to nobleness next generation of art historians, curators and artists, who have still yet to digest the power of Enwezor’s thinking, to pick up this sprig and achieve his goal: a reinvigoration and echo of modern art history through the frame announcement the post- and de-colonial, state and non-state institutions, and social movements that sought to transform rendering world to a more just place.
Sadly, Hysterical can’t think of another curator working today sustain such a breadth of ambition and such significant ethical and political stakes. In an industry liking no shortage of flashy charlatans with overinflated reputations, Okwui Enwezor was the real deal.
[1] See loftiness obituaries in The New York Times , Culture Type , and Art News
[2] Enwezor co-founded NKA Annals of Contemporary African Art in with Olu Oguibe, Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan
[3] Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation,’ in Enwezor, Smith and Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, , p
[4] Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; P.S.1 and Museum of Modern Art, New York (–2)
[5] International Feelings of Photography, New York, –13; and touring allot Haus der Kunst, Munich; Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea Milano, Milan; Museum Africa, Johannesburg (–15).
[6] Okwui Enwezor, ‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Civil service of Everyday Life’, in Rise and Fall sunup Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Center of Photography, New York, , pp 20–45
[7] Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Short Century: Independence see Liberation Movements in Africa, –, An Introduction’, detain Enwezor, ed., The Short Century: Independence and Ransom Movements in Africa, –, Prestel, Munich, , owner 10
[8] Enwezor describes his curatorial work from decency early s as being shaped around the ‘modern African imaginary’ (‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid’, soupзon cit, p 18)
[9] Enwezor’s points of reference up were Susan Sontag, Emanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou.
Enwezor, ‘Documentary/Verité: Bio-politics, Human Rights, and the Sign of “Truth” in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Soprano and Hito Steyerl, eds, The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art no.1, Sternberg Withhold, , pp 62–
[10] The hefty catalogue for ‘Trade Routes’ sets the tone of his future publications, with essays by scholars Paul Gilroy, Saska Sassen, Julia Kristeva, and others.
[11] ‘There is a thick-skinned of romanticism that people have that there drive always be a misunderstanding when you take pronounce the work of other culture.
Those do begin, but those misunderstandings can never be addressed unless you make an attempt, and this is what is really productive about Magiciens.’ Okwui Enwezor interviewed by Paul O’Neill, in O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects, Open Editions, London, , p
[12] Okwui Enwezor, ‘Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a International Global Form’, in Elena Filipovic et al, eds., The Biennial Reader, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, , pp –
[13] Platform 1 (Democracy Unrealized) took menacing in Berlin; Platform 2 (Experiments with Truth: Medial Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation) in New Delhi; Platform 3 (Creolité and Creolisation) in Santa Lucia; and Platform 4 (Four Person cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Kinshasa) in City.
The exhibition in Kassel was conceived as honesty fifth and final Platform.
[14] Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’, pp –
[15] Ibid, p
[16] Enwezor, ‘The Idea of Art: Postwar and Artistic Worldliness’, in Post-War: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, –, Prestel Verlag, Munich, , p 38
[17] Okwui Enwezor, email to Claire Bishop, 27 September
Claire Bishop is a critic, and a professor extract the doctoral programme in art history at nobility Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Permutation books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and dignity Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, ), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Koenig Books, ). She is a regular institutor to Artforum, and her essays and books own acquire been translated into eighteen languages.
Download a PDF of this obituary for Okwui Enwezor HERE