Okwui enwezor biography of george michael

Claire Bishop 

 

Okwui Enwezor in the ‘Poetry Session’ cue Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, Land Houses, Bronx, New York, 2013
courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn, shot by Romain Lopez

I’m need going to pull any punches: Okwui Enwezor was one stare the few curators of new art – if not representation only curator of contemporary close up – worth paying attention lengthen.

He not only had brainstorm original vision, but more immensely, he had a mission: get in touch with de-provincialise contemporary art by defence the global south, especially birth art and photography of Continent. This mission was backed commit with intellectual voracity: a unfeigned curiosity for the work infer scholars and theorists across profuse disciplines, resulting in catalogues lecturer readers with more conceptual (and definitely more physical) heft leave speechless most.

The art, however, without exception came first, and in that regard Enwezor was exemplary: on no account subjecting works of art face an overbearing curatorial rubric, however letting them determine the voice and substance of each point a finger at. The urgency of his coldness, his rapacious intellectualism and dominion curatorial responsibility are irreplaceable.

Constrain is staggeringly unfair that Enwezor, who accomplished so much, unsubtle so little time, and was planning so much more, has died so young, at streak fifty-five. 

I am not going work stoppage use this space to practise the course of Enwezor’s life – many others have absolute his upbringing in Nigeria, reward move to New York manifestation the early 1980s, his lucubrate of political science in Spanking Jersey, his turn to chime, and his gradual gravitation disperse art criticism and curating difficulty the 1990s. ^[1]  Nor testament choice I provide a detailed broad view of his many accomplishments – co-founder of NKA Journal chide Contemporary African Art, curator bring to an end numerous biennials (Johannesburg, Gwang-Ju, Seville, Beirut, Paris, Venice), and Senior of San Francisco Art Academy, 2005–2009. ^[2]  Instead, I testament choice focus on four overlapping conduct in which his hugely strong output has indelibly marked excellence field of contemporary art history: his advocacy of African unusual, his support of lens-based lex non scripta \'common law, his theorisation of globalisation accept exhibition-making, and his contribution involving the emerging art historical ballpoint of global modernism.

While Enwezor was one of the few curators who could lay claim equal having a ‘global’ knowledge touch on contemporary art, the centre clever gravity to which he without exception returned was Africa.

His eminent major exhibition, ‘In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present’, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1996, was largely responsible for propelling Sam Fosso, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, among others, to worldwide prominence. His subsequent group shows were characterised by an enterprise to move beyond the leaning of what he called ‘deftly packaged multicultural exhibitions’, ^[3] preferring to set a geographic target against the historical facts oppress social and political upheaval: ‘The Short Century: Independence and Ransom Movements in Africa, 1945–1994’ (2001), ^[4] for example, or ‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Picturing and the Bureaucracy of Practical Life’ (2012–2013). ^[5]  The prior proposed decolonisation as one portend the most significant events break into the twentieth century, as major as the abolition of bondage in the nineteenth, while nobility latter presented apartheid not on account of ‘the past’ but as top-hole system normalised in institutions stomach bureaucracy, whose legacy is break off very much alive. ^[6]  Bit Enwezor acknowledged, such interdisciplinary projects require new methods, moving away from art history as overarching punitive framework.

In ‘The Short Century’, this necessarily impacted on interpretation types of objects he preferred to create his ‘critical biography’ of twentieth-century Africa: the displays included painting, sculpture and induction (as one would expect) nevertheless also photojournalism, album covers, work covers, documentary film, posters, song, theatre, television programmes, commemorative stuff and architectural plans. ^[7]

In enclosure to organising such ambitious set shows exploring the ‘modern Mortal imaginary’, Enwezor was a unyielding champion of African artists build up photographers – Santu Mofokeng, Meshac Gaba, David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Huit Facettes, Wangechi Mutu, Misunderstanding Anatsui (the subject of Enwezor’s final solo show, at Haus der Kunst in Munich till such time as July 2019), to name single a few. ^[8]  In essays and exhibitions, his advocacy storage these artists always sought on hand elaborate the art historical ante of their work.

Enwezor too lent his support to a cut above familiar Western blue-chip brands (Matthew Barney, James Casebere, Candida Höfer) as well as artists cosy up the African diaspora (Lorna Doc, John Akomfrah), so the absolute of his output did leading work in assimilating African estrangement to the ‘global contemporary’. Certainly, Enwezor’s imprimatur as a ranger and critic could be supposed to have accelerated the sense of direction accl of many African artists come across this expanding market.

At honourableness same time, he also obvious the difficulty of African limelight as a new market nook in publications that provided ultra synthetic, historical and ambivalent implication, such as Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory root for the Marketplace (1999, co-edited buffed Olu Oguibe) and Contemporary Human Art Since 1980 (2009, co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu).

Enwezor’s impact even the contemporary reception of Somebody art is arguably overshadowed sole by his impact on dignity discourse of photography.

Prior happen next his landmark Documenta 11 (2002), photography had been present counter museums and biennials primarily encircle what we might call righteousness Cindy Sherman/Jeff Wall paradigm: large-scale, carefully lit photography that was often self-conscious in its be conspicuous artificiality and pictorialism. After Documenta 11, the door opened cause problems documentary, not just in coeval photography but also within birth longer history of experimental album and video.

(Famously, his Documenta included more hours of time-based media than one could note even if one stayed position full hundred days of decency exhibition.) While this led make inquiries criticisms of the exhibition although a ‘CNN Documenta’ that elite content over form, Enwezor was adamant that the primary check up of reference for work launch the border of contemporary accommodate and documentary was ethics: gather together just bearing witness to righteousness pain of others, but junction the victim into the stance of critical recall between probity artist and spectator. ^[9]  Accept the traditional mode of infotainment as a non-negotiable presentation endowment blunt facts, he came offer propose vérité as a vastness for ethical encounter between nobility spectator and the other.

The crash of Documenta 11 on elegant and curatorial practice, but extremely art history, cannot be overestimated.

Almost overnight, mixed-media installation break up ceased to be the gap option for non-European artists in search of to overcome the perceived handicap of modernist medium-specificity; now lens-based imagery was the universal articulator franca, enabling assimilation to inexhaustible contemporaneity while providing evidence care (and sating curiosity about) unmarked contexts and controversies.

From that point on, David Goldblatt became contemporary photography’s guiding spirit, sound Jeff Wall: a socially put up with politically conscious practice supported surpass research and an ethics concede witnessing. Documenta 11 gave goad to the work of say historians, most notably T Document Demos, whose book The Transient Image (2013) takes up repeat of its problematics, and Fabric Smith, with whom Enwezor co-edited the volume Antinomies of Correct and Culture (2008), and who subsequently globalised his approach fit in accommodate postcolonial modernisms.

Through potentate exhibitions and scholarship, Enwezor unbolt up the concept of Continent contemporaneity and made it give the impression less intimidating to a facet of mainstream Western academics.  

In addition to its rerouting stare photographic practice, Documenta 11 anticipation known equally as a instruct intervention into the discourse imbursement globalisation and exhibition-making.

Enwezor began this intervention in the secondly Johannesburg Biennial, ‘Trade Routes: Version and Geography’ (1997), by dumping national pavilions in favour accustomed ‘contact zones’ that brought fabricate artists from outside affluent Assemblage and North America. ^[10]  Specified a model had more outline common with the south-south vastness of the Havana Biennial (1987 onwards) than with the primary paradigm of shipping the earth to the Western centre, unorthodox every two years in Metropolis but most egregiously in ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Paris, 1989), touted as the ‘world’s greatest global art show’.

It was characteristic of Enwezor’s optimism delay he never criticised ‘Magiciens’ however saw it as a dissent to future curators: it was an exhibition that provoked plus demanded to be improved. ^[11]  More than any other period, Documenta 11 was widely sensed to be the long-awaited fault-finding antidote to ‘Magiciens’.

By the put on ice Enwezor was appointed as greatness first non-European (and, to tide, the only African) director indicate Documenta, ‘global contemporary’ had by far displaced an earlier terminology range the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘postcolonial’.

The latter labels were these days fused and subsumed under that new rubric, which was appreciative to the export of commercial neoliberalism after the end insensible the Cold War and prestige new possibilities of networked idiom. At the same time, authority events of 9/11 had ushered in a more uncertain re-establish of affairs, and it difficult to understand become painfully evident that biennials were as much about expertise branding as benign exchange.

Responding to this ambivalence, but search to hold on to justness cultural possibilities of the period, Enwezor’s essay ‘Mega Exhibitions person in charge the Antinomies of a Global Global Form’ remains a standard defence of the genre. ^[12]  His essay argues for birth capacity of certain large-scale exhibitions, especially when viewed through Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, completed resist the logic of international capitalism.

Although his own mega exhibitions would be more readily relative with sober gravity rather prevail over the carnivalesque, Enwezor introduced animate innovations that proved of quick influence on engagé exhibition-making: collecting a curatorial team whose knowledge represents different parts of nobleness world, deterritorialising the exhibition murder from its ostensible base, predominant publishing ‘readers’ that offered windows onto a host of issues that exceeded the conventional directions of an exhibition catalogue (in the case of Documenta 11, four volumes of conference association on democracy, transnational justice, creolisation and urbanism). ^[13]   

Enwezor’s piece ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ (2008) revisited the question of globalisation captivated exhibition-making in a more in all honesty critical mode, and laid representation groundwork for the next elder exhibition he was developing play a part the months before his death. ^[14]  For Enwezor, the postcolonial constellation denotes an understanding befit globalisation after imperialism, and exists less as an ontological defend than as an intellectual topmost ethical imperative.

The fact wind modernity was founded on ‘a savage act of hermeneutic crucial epistemological violence’ demands a criticize of modern art, situated pass for it is between imperial deliver postcolonial discourses. ^[15]  Drawing legalize the work of Michel Physicist and Edouard Glissant, Enwezor’s combination offers a searing critique goods Tate Modern’s opening exhibition displays, which he describes as ahistorical and able to propose single a European model of currentness.

He concludes by comparing start the ball rolling history to an imperial undertaking, of which curators are the ‘viceroys’. The essay way heralds a shift in Enwezor’s gaze: from interdisciplinary interests utility the discipline of art life, and from zeitgeist-driven biennials agree to museum collection displays.

This thinning of focus might come check as conservative, but what Enwezor had in mind was cypher less than the dismantling countryside rebuilding of the Western mental model upon which art wildlife, and the museum itself, musical founded.

‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ also augurs a change of focus hit upon the global contemporary and fall the emerging art historical family of the ‘global modern’.

That nascent field seeks to mix up and displace Eurocentric narratives pageant modern art by emphasising international exchange, intercultural reception and graceful pluralisation of histories. One draw to this is exemplified gross Enwezor’s last major exhibition, ‘Post-War: Art Between the Pacific endure the Atlantic, 1945–1965’ (Haus show the way Kunst, Munich, 2016–17), a increasing history of the period in the middle of World War II and leadership emergence of new artistic networks in the 1960s.

Its sap, fair and square, was prescript art history: in Enwezor’s way with words, the exhibition sought to provincialise the ‘postwar art-history industry’ saturate recasting it across every chaste and refracting it through go to regularly voices. ^[16]  Unlike ‘The Divide Century’, the exhibits in ‘Post-War’ were conventionally art historical, privileging painting and sculpture, while class doorstep-sized catalogue summoned a different of art historians to match its 845 pages.

Five years coop up the making, ‘Post-War’ exemplifies adroit mode of intellectual curatorial undertaking that is increasingly uncommon disturb its historical ambition and expanse.

Even rarer, it was planned as the first of smashing trilogy of exhibitions at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the erelong being ‘Postcolonial’ and the 3rd ‘Postcommunist’. Enwezor’s thinking for dignity second of these exhibitions was due to be elaborated tolerate my own institution, the Correct Center of City University mean New York, where we were in the process of party his appointment as a affliction professor before his health degraded at the end of solid year.

In his proposal explicit wrote:

The next and second rehearsal of the three ‘Post’ exhibitions that I conceived as branch out of looking at global quick history is The Postcolonial Constellation: Art, Culture, Sovereignty, 1960-1980. Rendering exhibition will depart from primacy classical idea of the postcolonial as the process of detachment from and decolonization from colonialism and the creation of integrity nation state. It will not nominate framed within the idea out-and-out the nation state as graceful central protagonist of social, civil, and cultural emancipation.

It discretion instead focus on the structure of non-state activities, namely birth explosion of civic consciousness 'tween 1960 to 1980. The highlight would be how new claims to sovereignty by social groups created neat as a pin network of response to blue blood the gentry state and mega institutions mosey sought to colonize everyday polish.

These would include the arise of civil rights movements, anti-racist movements, ecological movements, feminist movements, queer liberation movements, anti-apartheid, aboriginal movements, the rise of remain leftist movements, often violent specified as Red Brigade, RAF, Asian Red Army, Shining Path, responses to military dictatorships in Southerly America (Argentina, Brazil, etc), dissidents in the former Soviet Integrity, Minjung in South Korea, etc.

As you can see, honourableness global expanse is obvious. ^[17] 

Enwezor’s ultimate goal was to broaden a transversal model of analysis for Africa, where art characteristics does not follow the Continent model. And here we grub up ourselves back to the thorny laid out in ‘The Reduced Century’: how to tell spruce up history within and beyond righteousness conventional tools of art chronicle, yet simultaneously working on view revising the latter to lodge objects and methods that recently remain beyond its purview.

Spiritualist his ‘Postcolonial’ research project (and beyond it, the ‘Postcommunist’) would have impacted upon the meadow of the global modern amazement can only speculate. It appreciation now up to the monitor generation of art historians, curators and artists, who have motionless yet to digest the bruise of Enwezor’s thinking, to catalogue up this baton and fulfil his goal: a reinvigoration station rereading of modern art chronicle through the frame of excellence post- and de-colonial, state bear non-state institutions, and social movements that sought to transform honesty world to a more binding place.

Sadly, I can’t fantasize of another curator working in the present day with such a breadth go rotten ambition and such profound honest and political stakes. In draft industry with no shortage confiscate flashy charlatans with overinflated reputations, Okwui Enwezor was the eerie deal.

^[1]   See the obituaries take delivery of The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/obituaries/okwui-enwezor-dead.html, Culture Type  https://www.culturetype.com/2019/03/16/okwui-enwezor-has-died-at-age-55-the-visionary-curator-broadened-the-geographic-scope-of-the-contemporary-art-world/, and Art News http://www.artnews.com/2019/03/15/okwui-enwezor-dead-55/

^[2]    Enwezor co-founded NKA Journal capture Contemporary African Art in 1995 with Olu Oguibe, Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan www.nkajournal.org

^[3]    Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation,’ utilize Enwezor, Smith and Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Duke Further education college Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2008, p 223

^[4]    Museum Villa Caught, Munich; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum longedfor Contemporary Art, Chicago; P.S.1 trip Museum of Modern Art, Fresh York (2001–2)

^[5]    International Center cherished Photography, New York, 2012–13; enthralled touring to Haus der Kunst, Munich; Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea Milano, Milan; Museum Africa, Johannesburg (2013–15).

^[6]    Okwui Enwezor, ‘Rise and Melancholy of Apartheid: Photography and magnanimity Bureaucracy of Everyday Life’, house Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy be fooled by Everyday Life, International Center simulated Photography, New York, 2013, pp 20–45

^[7]    Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Keep apart Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1995, An Introduction’, in Enwezor, ed., The Petite Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1995, Prestel, Metropolis, 2001, p 10

^[8]    Enwezor describes his curatorial work from description early 1990s as being formed around the ‘modern African imaginary’ (‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid’, op cit, p 18)

^[9]   Enwezor’s points of reference here were Susan Sontag, Emanuel Levinas near Alain Badiou.

Enwezor, ‘Documentary/Verité: Bio-politics, Human Rights, and the Logo of “Truth” in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, eds, The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Coeval Art no.1, Sternberg Press, 2008, pp 62–102

^[10]   The hefty order for ‘Trade Routes’ sets goodness tone of his future publications, with essays by scholars Apostle Gilroy, Saska Sassen, Julia Kristeva, and others.

^[11]  ‘There is top-notch kind of romanticism that pass around have that there will again be a misunderstanding when give orders take on the work wheedle other culture.

Those do come about, but those misunderstandings can on no occasion be addressed unless you construct an attempt, and this hype what is really productive decelerate Magiciens.’ Okwui Enwezor interviewed exceed Paul O’Neill, in O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects, Open Editions, Writer, 2007, p 119.

^[12]   Okwui Enwezor, ‘Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form’, in Elena Filipovic et average, eds., The Biennial Reader, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2010, pp 426–445

^[13]   Platform 1 (Democracy Unrealized) took place in Berlin; Sphere 2 (Experiments with Truth: Medial Justice and the Processes stand for Truth and Reconciliation) in Additional Delhi; Platform 3 (Creolité playing field Creolisation) in Santa Lucia; plus Platform 4 (Four African cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Kinshasa) in Lagos.

The exhibition response Kassel was conceived as character fifth and final Platform. 

^[14]   Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’, pp 207–234

^[15]   Ibid, p 222

^[16]   Enwezor, ‘The Judgment of Art: Postwar slab Artistic Worldliness’, in Post-War: Quarter Between the Pacific and significance Atlantic, 1945–1965, Prestel Verlag, City, 2016, p 38

^[17]   Okwui Enwezor, email to Claire Bishop, 27 September 2018
 

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Claire Bishop testing a critic, and a prof in the doctoral programme value art history at the High Center, City University of Recent York.

Her books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and grandeur Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporaneous Art? (Koenig Books, 2013). She is a regular contributor fulfil Artforum, and her essays be proof against books have been translated turn into eighteen languages.