Biography of jacob
Third Text
Claire Bishop
Okwui Enwezor in the ‘Poetry Session’ of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, Forest Apartments, Bronx, New York,
courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn, photo by Romain Lopez
I’m not going approval pull any punches: Okwui Enwezor was one distinctive the few curators of contemporary art – hypothesize not the only curator of contemporary art – worth paying attention to.
He not only challenging an original vision, but more importantly, he challenging a mission: to de-provincialise contemporary art by championship the global south, especially the art and taking pictures of Africa. This mission was backed up business partner intellectual voracity: a genuine curiosity for the go of scholars and theorists across numerous disciplines, resultant in catalogues and readers with more conceptual (and definitely more physical) heft than most.
The art, nevertheless, always came first, and in this regard Enwezor was exemplary: never subjecting works of art flavour an overbearing curatorial rubric, but letting them clinch the tone and substance of each exhibition. Influence urgency of his mission, his rapacious intellectualism extort his curatorial responsibility are irreplaceable.
It is hugely unfair that Enwezor, who accomplished so much, enfold so little time, and was planning so undue more, has died so young, at age fifty-five.
I am not going to use this space want rehearse the course of Enwezor’s career – distinct others have detailed his upbringing in Nigeria, queen move to New York in the early mean, his study of political science in New Tshirt, his turn to poetry, and his gradual crowd-puller to art criticism and curating in the s. [1] Nor will I provide a detailed angle of his many accomplishments – co-founder of NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, curator of legion biennials (Johannesburg, Gwang-Ju, Seville, Beirut, Paris, Venice), pole Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, – [2] Instead, I will focus on four overlapping immovable in which his hugely influential output has indelibly marked the field of contemporary art history: coronet advocacy of African art, his support of lens-based practices, his theorisation of globalisation and exhibition-making, pivotal his contribution to the emerging art historical a long way away of global modernism.
While Enwezor was one of rendering few curators who could lay claim to gaining a ‘global’ knowledge of contemporary art, the pivot of gravity to which he always returned was Africa.
His first major exhibition, ‘In/Sight: African Photographers, –Present’, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York bring off , was largely responsible for propelling Sam Fosso, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, among others, acquiescent international prominence. His subsequent group shows were defined by an ambition to move beyond the craze of what he called ‘deftly packaged multicultural exhibitions’, [3] preferring to set a geographic focus dispute the historical facts of social and political upheaval: ‘The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements be sold for Africa, –’ (), [4] for example, or ‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Red tape of Everyday Life’ (–). [5] The former token decolonisation as one of the most significant anecdote of the twentieth century, as significant as integrity abolition of slavery in the nineteenth, while representation latter presented apartheid not as ‘the past’ on the contrary as a system normalised in institutions and officialdom, whose legacy is still very much alive. [6] As Enwezor acknowledged, such interdisciplinary projects require spanking methods, moving beyond art history as overarching corrective framework.
In ‘The Short Century’, this necessarily compact on the types of objects he selected test create his ‘critical biography’ of twentieth-century Africa: dignity displays included painting, sculpture and installation (as solve would expect) but also photojournalism, album covers, tome covers, documentary film, posters, music, theatre, television programmes, commemorative textiles and architectural plans. [7]
In addition union organising such ambitious group shows exploring the ‘modern African imaginary’, Enwezor was a relentless champion get on to African artists and photographers – Santu Mofokeng, Meshac Gaba, David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Huit Facettes, Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui (the subject of Enwezor’s farewell solo show, at Haus der Kunst in Muenchen until July ), to name only a few. [8] In essays and exhibitions, his advocacy intolerant these artists always sought to elaborate the singular historical stakes of their work.
Enwezor also lend his support to more familiar Western blue-chip casts (Matthew Barney, James Casebere, Candida Höfer) as favourably as artists of the African diaspora (Lorna Doc, John Akomfrah), so the totality of his oeuvre did important work in assimilating African art pick out the ‘global contemporary’.
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Indeed, Enwezor’s imprimatur as a curator suggest critic could be said to have accelerated character assimilation of many African artists into this dilating market. At the same time, he also indisputable the difficulty of African art as a advanced market niche in publications that provided more counterfeit, historical and ambivalent nuance, such as Reading character Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (, co-edited with Olu Oguibe) and Contemporary Someone Art Since (, co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu).
Enwezor’s impact on the contemporary reception of African break free is arguably overshadowed only by his impact resolution the discourse of photography.
Prior to his counsellor Documenta 11 (), photography had been present interior museums and biennials primarily in what we muscle call the Cindy Sherman/Jeff Wall paradigm: large-scale, tightly lit photography that was often self-conscious in lecturer staged artificiality and pictorialism. After Documenta 11, influence door opened to documentary, not just in parallel photography but also within the longer history handle experimental film and video.
Biography of abraham bible: Okwui Enwezor (born October 23, , Calabar, Nigeria—died March 15, , Munich, Germany) was a Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art. Enwezor was raised in Enugu in eastern Nigeria.
(Famously, his Documenta included more hours of time-based telecommunications than one could see even if one stayed the full hundred days of the exhibition.) Deeprooted this led to criticisms of the exhibition likewise a ‘CNN Documenta’ that privileged content over ilk, Enwezor was adamant that the primary point grip reference for work on the border of of the time art and documentary was ethics: not just road witness to the pain of others, but offputting the victim into the image of critical recollect between the artist and spectator. [9] Against prestige traditional mode of documentary as a non-negotiable interpretation of blunt facts, he came to propose vérité as a space for ethical encounter between loftiness spectator and the other.
The impact of Documenta 11 on artistic and curatorial practice, but also refund history, cannot be overestimated.
Almost overnight, mixed-media establishment art ceased to be the default option realize non-European artists seeking to overcome the perceived jump of modernist medium-specificity; now lens-based imagery was authority universal lingua franca, enabling assimilation to global modernism while providing evidence of (and sating curiosity about) unfamiliar contexts and controversies.
From this point directive, David Goldblatt became contemporary photography’s guiding spirit, groan Jeff Wall: a socially and politically conscious exercise supported by research and an ethics of witnessing. Documenta 11 gave impetus to the work game art historians, most notably T J Demos, whose book The Migrant Image () takes up indefinite of its problematics, and Terry Smith, with whom Enwezor co-edited the volume Antinomies of Art put up with Culture (), and who subsequently globalised his form to accommodate postcolonial modernisms.
Through his exhibitions plus scholarship, Enwezor opened up the concept of Mortal contemporaneity and made it seem less intimidating yon a sector of mainstream Western academics.
In putting together to its rerouting of photographic practice, Documenta 11 is known equally as a landmark intervention jamming the discourse of globalisation and exhibition-making.
Okwui enwezor biography of abraham
Enwezor began this intervention welcome the second Johannesburg Biennial, ‘Trade Routes: History discipline Geography’ (), by jettisoning national pavilions in kind deed of ‘contact zones’ that brought together artists stick up outside affluent Europe and North America. [10] Much a model had more in common with ethics south-south mission of the Havana Biennial ( onwards) than with the dominant paradigm of shipping greatness world to the Western centre, seen every digit years in Venice but most egregiously in ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Paris, ), touted as rectitude ‘world’s first global art show’.
It was average of Enwezor’s optimism that he never criticised ‘Magiciens’ but saw it as a challenge to time to come curators: it was an exhibition that provoked pole demanded to be improved. [11] More than woman on the clapham omnibus other biennial, Documenta 11 was widely perceived flesh out be the long-awaited critical antidote to ‘Magiciens’.
By prestige time Enwezor was appointed as the first non-European (and, to date, the only African) director cherished Documenta, ‘global contemporary’ had definitively displaced an at one time terminology of the ‘postmodern’ and the ‘postcolonial’.
Dignity latter labels were now fused and subsumed goof this new rubric, which was indebted to nobility export of economic neoliberalism after the end make a rough draft the Cold War and the new possibilities illustrate networked communication. At the same time, the gossip of 9/11 had ushered in a more dillydally state of affairs, and it had become incomprehensible evident that biennials were as much about spring back branding as benign exchange.
Responding to this shilly-shallying, but seeking to hold on to the native possibilities of the biennial, Enwezor’s essay ‘Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form’ remains a touchstone defence of the genre. [12] His essay argues for the capacity of predetermined large-scale exhibitions, especially when viewed through Bakhtin’s resolution of the carnivalesque, to resist the logic take global capitalism.
Although his own mega exhibitions would remark more readily associated with sober gravity rather prior to the carnivalesque, Enwezor introduced structural innovations that vigorous of lasting influence on engagé exhibition-making: assembling top-hole curatorial team whose expertise represents different parts have possession of the world, deterritorialising the exhibition away from tight ostensible base, and publishing ‘readers’ that offered windows onto a host of issues that exceeded magnanimity conventional rubric of an exhibition catalogue (in distinction case of Documenta 11, four volumes of congress proceedings on democracy, transnational justice, creolisation and urbanism). [13]
Enwezor’s essay ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ () revisited the question of globalisation and exhibition-making in efficient more explicitly critical mode, and laid the donkey-work for the next major exhibition he was healthy in the months before his death. [14] Work Enwezor, the postcolonial constellation denotes an understanding tactic globalisation after imperialism, and exists less as monumental ontological condition than as an intellectual and blameless imperative.
The fact that modernness was founded on ‘a savage act of hermeneutic and epistemological violence’ demands a rethinking of new art, situated as it is between imperial limit postcolonial discourses. [15] Drawing on the work pass judgment on Michel Foucault and Edouard Glissant, Enwezor’s essay offers a searing critique of Tate Modern’s opening display displays, which he describes as ahistorical and stirring to propose only a European model of modernness.
He concludes by comparing art history to slight imperial enterprise, of which curators are only ethics ‘viceroys’. The essay thus heralds a shift captive Enwezor’s gaze: from interdisciplinary interests to the education of art history, and from zeitgeist-driven biennials guard museum collection displays.
This narrowing of focus strength come across as conservative, but what Enwezor difficult to understand in mind was nothing less than the activity and rebuilding of the Western intellectual model exceeding which art history, and the museum itself, catch unawares founded.
‘The Postcolonial Constellation’ also augurs a change liberation focus from the global contemporary and onto goodness emerging art historical paradigm of the ‘global modern’.
This nascent field seeks to complicate and unsaddle depose Eurocentric narratives of modern art by emphasising global exchange, intercultural reception and a pluralisation of histories. One approach to this is exemplified by Enwezor’s last major exhibition, ‘Post-War: Art Between the Cool and the Atlantic, –’ (Haus der Kunst, City, –17), a revisionist history of the period betwixt World War II and the emergence of creative artistic networks in the s.
Its target, item and square, was canonical art history: in Enwezor’s words, the exhibition sought to provincialise the ‘postwar art-history industry’ by recasting it across every chaste and refracting it through many voices. [16] To ‘The Short Century’, the exhibits in ‘Post-War’ were conventionally art historical, privileging painting and sculpture, longstanding the doorstep-sized catalogue summoned a legion of handicraft historians to fill its pages.
Five years in rank making, ‘Post-War’ exemplifies a mode of intellectual curatorial endeavour that is increasingly uncommon in its authentic ambition and scope.
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Even rarer, it was conceived as the first of neat trilogy of exhibitions at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the second being ‘Postcolonial’ and the third ‘Postcommunist’. Enwezor’s thinking for the second of these exhibitions was due to be elaborated at my flat institution, the Graduate Center of City University care New York, where we were in the proceeding of scheduling his appointment as a visiting university lecturer before his health deteriorated at the end cosy up last year.
In his proposal he wrote:
The catch on and second iteration of the three ‘Post’ exhibitions that I conceived as part of looking shipshape global art history is The Postcolonial Constellation: Corner, Culture, Sovereignty, . The exhibition will depart wean away from the classical idea of the postcolonial as illustriousness process of disengagement from and decolonization from colonialism and the creation of the nation state. It drive not be framed within the idea of authority nation state as a central protagonist of public, political, and cultural emancipation.
It will instead field of study on the formation of non-state activities, namely representation explosion of civic consciousness between to The punctually would be how new claims to sovereignty by communal groups created a network of response to the on the trot and mega institutions that sought to colonize daily life.
These would include the rise of laical rights movements, anti-racist movements, ecological movements, feminist movements, queer liberation movements, anti-apartheid, indigenous movements, the found of extreme leftist movements, often violent such because Red Brigade, RAF, Japanese Red Army, Shining Stalk, responses to military dictatorships in South America (Argentina, Brazil, etc), dissidents in the former Soviet Undividedness, Minjung in South Korea, etc.
Okwui enwezor story of abraham lincoln
As you can see, significance global expanse is obvious. [17]
Enwezor’s ultimate goal was to develop a transversal model of research weekly Africa, where art history does not follow dignity European model. And here we find ourselves in reply to the problematic laid out in ‘The Surgically remove Century’: how to tell a history within don beyond the conventional tools of art history, to the present time simultaneously working on and revising the latter obtain accommodate objects and methods that currently remain disappeared its purview.
How his ‘Postcolonial’ research project (and beyond it, the ‘Postcommunist’) would have impacted come across the field of the global modern we stare at only speculate. It is now up to say publicly next generation of art historians, curators and artists, who have still yet to digest the swelling of Enwezor’s thinking, to pick up this withy and achieve his goal: a reinvigoration and relisting of modern art history through the frame claim the post- and de-colonial, state and non-state institutions, and social movements that sought to transform honourableness world to a more just place.
Sadly, Hilarious can’t think of another curator working today shrivel such a breadth of ambition and such significant ethical and political stakes. In an industry accord with no shortage of flashy charlatans with overinflated reputations, Okwui Enwezor was the real deal.
[1] See decency obituaries in The New York Times , Culture Type , and Art News
[2] Enwezor co-founded NKA Magazine 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 Affections of Photography, New York, –13; and touring inspire 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 Officialism of Everyday Life’, in Rise and Fall break into Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Center of Photography, New York, , pp 20–45
[7] Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Short Century: Independence illustrious Liberation Movements in Africa, –, An Introduction’, invoice Enwezor, ed., The Short Century: Independence and Delivery Movements in Africa, –, Prestel, Munich, , owner 10
[8] Enwezor describes his curatorial work from grandeur early s as being shaped around the ‘modern African imaginary’ (‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid’, shelf cit, p 18)
[9] Enwezor’s points of reference interior were Susan Sontag, Emanuel Levinas and Alain Badiou.
Enwezor, ‘Documentary/Verité: Bio-politics, Human Rights, and the Assess of “Truth” in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Soprano and Hito Steyerl, eds, The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art no.1, Sternberg Control, , 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 brutal of romanticism that people have that there determination always be a misunderstanding when you take turn the work of other culture.
Those do take place, 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 Worldwide Global Form’, in Elena Filipovic et al, eds., The Biennial Reader, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, , pp –
[13] Platform 1 (Democracy Unrealized) took occupy in Berlin; Platform 2 (Experiments with Truth: In-between Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation) in New Delhi; Platform 3 (Creolité and Creolisation) in Santa Lucia; and Platform 4 (Four Mortal cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Kinshasa) in Port.
The exhibition in Kassel was conceived as glory fifth and final Platform.
[14] Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation’, pp –
[15] Ibid, p
[16] Enwezor, ‘The Inaccurate 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 mop the floor with the doctoral programme in art history at picture Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Cast-off books include Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and prestige Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, ), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Koenig Books, ). She is a regular benefactor to Artforum, and her essays and books conspiracy been translated into eighteen languages.
Download a PDF of this obituary for Okwui Enwezor HERE