How Okwui Enwezor made the Art world bigger

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The many pieces in the two volumes also trace the way Enwezor expanded the canon alongside larger trends of the times, especially the globalization of the art world and the evolution of biennials, which are essential to understanding that world today. Enwezor’s own perspective evolves from a more hopeful, sanguine view of a gathering world in the ’90s into one that lucidly analyzes the crises of this new neoliberal era and the partly technological problem of “intense proximity” (his words) that prompted the rising authoritarianism and creeping nihilism of the 2010s

It is bittersweet to read these essays while wishing this searing, contrarian mind were still with us, still world-building, as we hard pivot into a new post-global, post-liberal era. But the collection shows that “his legacy remains an open work in progress, across multilayered platforms, for the many worlds to come, all of them postcolonial,” as Terry Smith, Enwezor’s close collaborator and editor of these collected writings, puts it in his introduction in the second volume

By Lauren Cornell

WHAT does it mean to be a world-builder? This term is used to describe artists, especially ones with innovative visual and conceptual vocabularies that create fictional alternatives to the world as it is. But the term could be applied in a different sense to Okwui Enwezor, who is among the most important architects of today’s art world as we know it. The poet, writer, curator, theorist, educator, and museum director mobilized new ways of seeing and living in our times. He was born in Calabar, Nigeria, in 1963, and his propulsive life was cut short in 2019 by illness. Now, the most recent contribution to his manifold legacy—a remarkable two-volume edition of his collected writings numbering just over a thousand pages—allows readers to follow his ideas as they evolve across his life and trace a pivotal time in art history, from the turn of the 20th to the early 21st century, when Enwezor was a major protagonist.

Throughout these pages, across catalog essays, exhibition reviews, and deep analyses of the work of individual artists, Enwezor’s expansive arguments frequently contract into lean summaries of intent: “My key interest has been rooted in the examination of artistic differencing through a form of curatorial counterinsurgency,” he wrote in 2007. “I have been examining contemporary African art through exhibitions, as specifically decisive places in which the idea of the contemporary can be constituted, and, as such, a place for the creation of its meaning in relation to an enlarged global public sphere.” This public sphere he described was rooted in experiences that curator Hoor Al-Qasimi describes as “beyond the purview of Western colonial epistemologies,” and in subject positions marked not by rigid categorization but by the fluidity and hybridity of a globalizing world on the move, one negotiating postcoloniality alongside the acceleration of capitalism and neoliberalism.

Enwezor: Selected Writings, Volume 1: Toward a New African Art Discourse and Volume 2: Curating the Postcolonial Condition, edited by Terry Smith; Durham, Duke University Press, 2025.Courtesy Duke University Press, Durham

The dominant art world Enwezor responds to at the beginning of this collection, which is arranged chronologically and spans the years 1994 to 2019, had a markedly different shape and critical consensus than that of today. That art world often took for granted that art history was centered in the West and disregarded global histories of colonialism and racism. The first essay in the volume is positioned passionately against the “epistemological bias” of the West and its systemic obscuring of facts that run against the story of Western Influence. It was written long before widespread demands to “decolonize” museum programs. In the mid-1990s, the international contemporary art world was also significantly smaller, with far fewer biennials and art fairs, and most modern and contemporary art histories were taught within a narrow Western lens—as was the case in my own Midwestern US college curriculum—despite decades of Black radicalism, cultural studies, anti-colonial theory, and real-world liberation.

All of this is to show what Enwezor was up against. His legacy would be to decenter the Western canon and break art open to divergent perspectives and experiences. He exemplified this early in his career when he was selected to curate the 2002 Documenta 11, the storied quinquennial exhibition, established in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Instead of focusing on the exhibition in its home city of Kassel, as was the tradition for more than a half century, he remapped the entire project into what he called “five platforms” so that it unfolded through a series of intensive lectures and conferences across four locations around the world: Vienna and Berlin, New Delhi, the West Indies, and Lagos, all leading up to a final act in Kassel. He wanted to frame “the exhibition as a diagnostic toolbox [that] actively seeks to stage the relationships, conjunctions, and disjunctions between different realities: between artists, institutions, disciplines, genres, generations, processes, forms, media, activities; between identity and subjectification.”

Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings, Volume 1: Toward a New African Art Discourse and Volume 2: Curating the Postcolonial Condition, edited by Terry Smith; Durham, Duke University Press, 2025.Courtesy Duke University Press, Durham

Documenta 11 was derided by the press for its ambition, and scrutinized for its identity and composition; David Galloway wrote in The New York Times that “most of the show’s Third World participants live in Europe or America and have frequently lent an exotic touch to international exhibitions,” and lamented that, for “art world insiders, the first challenge was how to pronounce [Enwezor’s] name correctly.” Now, his name is  well-known, as are those of the many artists, curators, writers, and scholars whom he uplifted and collaborated with on this exhibition and in his life, including Renée Green, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Doris Salcedo, and Raqs Media Collective, to name some of the many artists who participated in Documenta 11 and would go on to shape art in the 21^st century.

In the collection’s first essay, an impassioned editorial from the 1994 inaugural issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which he founded with Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Enwezor wrote: “One of the problematic aspects of visiting museums, art galleries, and other sites of cultural valuation, in Europe and in the United States, is the pervasive absence in these highly policed environments, of art by contemporary African artists.” He continued “not only are the works of these artists … conspicuously absent from the museum and gallery environment, they’ve also been accorded little attention of significance in academic art historical practices, university curriculums, the print media, or other organs of such reportage.” Taking aim at an art establishment resistant to substantive change, he goes on to argue against then current dichotomies such as “First/Third World, Center/Periphery, Black/White, and High/Low,” saying “there are too many complex dynamics attending to the varieties of cultural production in Africa, and in fact throughout the world, to allow for the erection of such suffocating enclosures.

The first issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, founded by Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan, and Chika Okeke Agulu in 1994

His own thinking was antithetical to such “suffocating enclosures.” He was an advocate of large-scale exhibitions and embodied a kind of “critical cosmopolitanism,” as the art historian Kobena Mercer once put it to me. One of the many ideas that shape-shifts throughout the book is that contemporary art unfolds within complex geopolitical arrangements, and that “the restless, unfixed boundaries, multiplicities, and the state of ‘permanent transition’ within which [contemporary art] is practiced and communicated” make it resistant to a single, unified view of art and “global totalization.” Though most art would ultimately be shown in a blank white cube, Enwezor took care to remind viewers that it originated in a specific context and set of conditions. His legacy did so much to make the art world more truly global, yet it did so not by proposing a new grand narrative, but rather by fracturing apart ideas of totalizing narratives.

This fracturing can be seen in his most influential exhibitions, which have become models in the field of curatorial studies and are documented in this book. Take “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” which opened in 2001 at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich. The show provided a “‘critical biography’ of Africa” by focusing on the continent’s decolonization that, in his words, required “defense and legitimation of all and every sphere of African thought and life.” Modernism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and other political and cultural movements were narrated in the exhibition through visual art, sound, music, theatre, posters, and more. The exhibition embedded art within larger, sometimes opposing currents of history, politics, and culture, and became a hallmark of his curatorial method, one that created avenues for exhibition-making and for a contemporary art that was bound to its context.

Enwezor served as director of Haus der Kunst in Munich from 2011 to 2018.Top left: Photo Joerg Koch via Getty; Top right: Photo Hannes Magerstaedt via Getty; Bottom: Photo Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty

Many of Enwezor’s projects highlighted cultural documents—particularly photography, for itsdual capacity to both open up social possibility and to mislead or obscure. This can be seen in two exhibitions he organized while adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. The first, “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” (2008), took its title from Jacques Derrida’s book of the same name, and captured artists’ use of archives as materials. The second, “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life” (2012), included nearly five hundred photographs, as well as films, literature, and magazines that narrate the history of apartheid in South Africa and the swelling movement to dismantle it. In the essay accompanying “Rise and Fall,” he provides a surgical analysis on how photographic culture—including photojournalists and artists alike—fueled anti-apartheid protests. In one passage, he writes of how Margaret Bourke-White, a Life contributor, captured a “political and pictorial transition” in the nascent anti-apartheid movement in her 1948 photograph of a white man standing by a large ornamental plinth outside the Johannesburg City Hall on which the defiant words “God is Black” had been chalked, the comment appearing to upend the power dynamics embedded in the public space. Enwezor is widely known for his biennials—Johannesburg (1997) and Venice (2015), and especially his transformative Documenta 11 (2002)—but these focused thematic exhibitions also lucidly capture how he answered his own charge to curators: to “work both within canonical thinking and against the grain of that thinking.”

The many pieces in the two volumes also trace the way Enwezor expanded the canon alongsidelarger trends of the times, especially the globalization of the art world and the evolution of biennials, which are essential to understanding that world today. Enwezor’s own perspective evolves from a more hopeful, sanguine view of a gathering world in the ’90s into one that lucidly analyzes the crises of this new neoliberal era and the partly technological problem of “intense proximity” (his words) that prompted the rising authoritarianism and creeping nihilism of the 2010s.

It is bittersweet to read these essays while wishing this searing, contrarian mind were still with us, still world-building, as we hard pivot into a new post-global, post-liberal era. But the collection shows that “his legacy remains an open work in progress, across multilayered platforms, for the many worlds to come, all of them postcolonial,” as Terry Smith, Enwezor’s close collaborator and editor of these collected writings, puts it in his introduction in the second volume. The books elucidate the many tools and methods Enwezor developed throughout his career, encouraging us to see the contemporary not as a break from the past but as a complex storm of past histories, old habits, and new possibilities that surround and inform art.

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