Okwui Enwezor, who inarguably organized some of the most important exhibitions of the past century, never expected that he would play a significant role in art history. “I never really set out to be a curator,” Enwezor told the New York Times in 2002. Having studied political science as an undergraduate, the Nigerian-born curator became an art-world fixture after forming Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art with Salah M. Hassan, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and Olu Oguibe in 1994. That publication, which remains massively influential, put Enwezor on the fast track, allowing him to organize shows for major institutions.
A series of touted biennials and survey shows followed in the years to come. Enwezor’s greatest intervention with these exhibitions was to view art history as global, showing that artists based in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were making just as significant contributions as ones in the U.S. and Europe. These shows also envisioned the field of art history as something flexible and, by its very nature, incomplete, and Enwezor—a passionate, ambitious curator with a no-nonsense sensibility—worked tirelessly to reshape it over and over again. Ultimately, he succeeded in making the discipline more inclusive.
Enwezor died in 2019, and his loss is still being mourned in the art world. In 2021, Marian Goodman Gallery, Independent Curators International, and artist Steve McQueen joined forces to create an initiative meant to support early- and mid-career BIPOC curators. Around the same time, the New Museum in New York opened one of the final shows organized by Enwezor, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” an exhibition focused on “Black grief and white grievance,” according to its description. (Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash helped realized the show after Enwezor’s death.) Also in 2021, Nka will devote a special issue to Enwezor, and in 2022, under the aegis of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates will organize an edition curated with Enwezor’s proposed theme as its basis.
With the art world continuing to consider Enwezor’s manifold accomplishments, below is a look back at the curator’s 10 most important exhibitions.
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“Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life” at International Center of Photography, New York (2014)
Enwezor was a dedicated researcher, delving deep into the histories and theories that undergirded his carefully curated exhibitions. “Rise and Fall of Apartheid,” for which he reviewed over the course of six years more than 30,000 images documenting life in South Africa under apartheid, displayed that sensibility. With his co-curator Rory Bester, he selected 500 works that tell the history of the country’s brutal segregation and systemic disenfranchisement of Black South Africans, beginning in 1948 and ending in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela was elected president. The exhibition included the work of more than 70 photographers, the majority of whom were South African, from well-known artists like David Goldblatt and Ernest Cole to lesser-known photojournalists; contemporary artworks made in response were also included. “The inquiry of this exhibition is to explore the degree to which photography was present at the scene of the crime,” Enwezor told ARTnews at the time. “The role of photography in the struggle against apartheid is far larger than we can really imagine. It became one of the most persuasive, instrumental, ideological tools.”
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“Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” at International Center of Photography, New York (2008)
How truthful and complete can an archive really be, and what role should its content play in our lives? These were the questions that guided “Archive Fever,” a group show that was unafraid to delve into the knotty, academic questions associated with them. With a spread of artists ranging from Vivan Sundaram to Lorna Simpson represented, the show explored an aesthetic impulse that was becoming evident in photography and moving-image art of the era without any the spectacle that is often expected of major New York museum shows. In a review of “Archive Fever” for the New York Times, critic Holland Cotter wrote that it “read like breaking news and had the pull of a good documentary.”
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Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008)
By their design, biennials are meant to take place over the course of several months and then largely disappear. Leave it to Enwezor, then, to render that format null and void. Inspired by the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the push toward community-building that resulted from it, Enwezor created a biennial that was largely composed of a smattering of exhibitions that had already appeared elsewhere. (Aptly, the biennial was titled “Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions.”) Alongside all this was a section termed “Position Papers,” which allowed curators to create their own mini-presentations. In an unusual gesture, this was a biennial without a theme and, to a certain degree, without a place. “My metaphor for these touring exhibitions is one of complex traveling worlds,” Enwezor said in an Artforum interview. “I wanted to imagine Asia as part of the new destination of the evolving system of global art and cultural markets.”
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“El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale” at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019)
Between 2011 and 2018, Enwezor served as the director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, one of Germany’s most important institutions. During his tenure there, which ended acrimoniously, Enwezor mounted some of the most important exhibitions of the decade, with a particular focus on giving major solo shows to Black artists, including Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Frank Bowling, and El Anatsui. Though the Anatsui show—one of the largest ever devoted to a Black African artist in Europe—opened after Enwezor’s departure from the institution, it demonstrated the grand ways he sought to highlight and celebrate the work of the most important artists working today. For this exhibition, Enwezor and his co-curator Chika Okeke-Agulu brought together pieces made between the 1970s and ’90s, along with 16 of Anatsui’s major sculptural works, including a commissioned piece that the artist had made for the museum’s façade, Second Wave (2019), made of nearly 10,000 plates. Made from discarded and reused metal bottle caps, Anatsui’s works in this style, first begun in the early 2000s, oscillate between appearing hard and fragile, and are often draped around or over various surfaces. Enwezor’s exhibition, like the works themselves, reflected on the ways that colonialism continues to structure the world in which we live.
Also traveled to: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland
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Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1997)
Enwezor’s critical success with his 1996 Guggenheim Museum show “In/Sight” led to him organizing the second edition of the Johannesburg Biennale, which also included two exhibition sites in Cape Town. In titling his edition “Trade Routes: History and Geography,” Enwezor was hinting at what would become the driving force of his curatorial practice for the next two decades, showing that the history of art was inextricably linked to the histories of people and their movements around the world. Working with six other curators (Kellie Jones, Gerardo Mosquera, Octavio Zaya, Hou Hanru, Colin Richards, and Yu Yeon Kim), who organized distinct sections within the show, Enwezor and his team gathered together the work of 145 artists from 35 countries, with a particular emphasis on conceptually oriented installations, photography, and film and video. Among the artists who showed were Yinka Shonibare, Carrie Mae Weems, Santu Mofokeng, Pepón Osorio, Cildo Meireles, Huang Yong Ping, Shirin Neshat, Stan Douglas, Ghada Amer, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Sue Williamson. The Johannesburg Biennale is significant within Enwezor’s own biography: it was the first show of its kind from a curator who would come to reinvent the biennial format over and over in the years to come.
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Venice Biennale, Italy (2015)
Only two people have ever organized the main exhibition for the Venice Biennale and Documenta, and Enwezor was one of them. He well as being the first African to organize the Biennale. For his showcase, Enwezor continued the curatorial approach he developed in organizing Documenta 11, a global exhibition that explored the breadth of contemporary art, all the while looking at the ways in which colonialism and capitalism impact the lived realities of people around the world. Among the almost 140 artists and collectives included in his Venice Biennale were John Akomfrah, Huma Bhabha, Ricardo Brey, Teresa Burga, Cao Fei, Melvin Edwards, Coco Fusco, Charles Gaines, Sônia Gomes, Gulf Labor, Hiwa K, Ibrahim Mahama, Kerry James Marshall, and Emeka Ogboh, as well as historical figures like Marcel Broodthaers, Walker Evans, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. In titling the show “All the World’s Futures,” Enwezor hinted that he was trying to envision the ways in which art could initiate new means of living in a time beyond our current moment.
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“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2001)
Enwezor’s ambitions were grand—“I wouldn’t be shocked if he ran for president of Nigeria,” curator Thelma Golden once quipped—and they certainly did not fail him with this critically acclaimed survey focused on decolonial movements in Africa and their impact on art over the course of nearly 50 years. (Its purview was bracketed by 1945’s Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, and the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994.) The show featured a diverse array of art, from experiments with abstraction by Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ernest Mancoba to more recent works by Bodys Isek Kingelez and Zarina Bhimji, and the spread of historical happenings covered was equally vast: among the multitude of events surveyed were the rise of Pan-Africanism, the Negritude movement, wars for independence in Algeria and Mozambique, and apartheid in South Africa. In a 2019 memoriam for Enwezor, art historian Claire Bishop wrote that the show “proposed decolonization as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century, as significant as the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth.”
Also traveled to: Haus der Weltkulturen in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and MoMA PS1 in New York
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“In/Sight: African Photographers 1940 to Present” at Guggenheim Museum, New York (1996)
When Enwezor got his first major curatorial credit with this modest but influential survey, the world had not yet seen everything he was capable of. Still, the show acted as a preview of his recurring interests—in particular the sense that artists in nations beyond the U.S. and Europe were making hugely important art that required an understanding of its own separate, nuanced historical lineage. Co-organized with Guggenheim curator Clare Bell, as well as Danielle Tilkin and Octavio Zaya, the show surveyed five and a half decades’ worth of African photography, with the offerings ranging from studio portraits to conceptual work. The 30 artists included did not evince any singular aesthetic, and that was partially the point of “In/Sight”—to show that contemporary African photography could not be distilled to one set of interests or ideas. Largely because of the show, artists like Samuel Fosso, Santu Mofokeng, Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode rose to fame in the U.S.
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“Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965” at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2016–17)
The history of postwar art, at least as it exists in the U.S. and Europe, has long followed a progression of loose movements: Abstract Expressionism gave way to Happenings and other avant-garde experiments, which then led to Pop, Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. “Postwar,” a grand survey that Enwezor curated with Katy Siegel, proposed a whole new trajectory that placed these movements alongside ones taking place on all corners of the world. Artists from Brazil’s Neo-Concretism movement shared space with Japan’s Gutai avant-gardists; figures who are lesser-known in the West, like Valente Malangatana Ngwenya, Iba N’Diaye, and Sindoedarsono Sudjojono, were put on equal footing with giants like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Jack Whitten. The show—and its massive 800-page catalogue—effectively tore a hole in the continuum of art history, showing that a myopic focus on the U.S. and Europe would not be enough to portray a full picture of the wild, weird, and groundbreaking art produced in the two decades after World War II. As the West’s biggest institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art to Tate Modern, wrestle with how to offer a global vision of modern and contemporary art, the lessons of “Postwar” live on.
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Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002)
Documenta 11 was a watershed—“an earthquake in the art world,” as Enwezor recounted to the Wall Street Journal in 2014, speaking of his appointment. Named as the exhibition’s artistic director in 1998, Enwezor was the first African, the first non-European, and the first nonwhite curator ever to head up the storied exhibition, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, and is often seen as the world’s most important showcase of contemporary art. Enwezor’s approach to the exhibition was different than previous iterations of Documenta—and continues to influence how the exhibition is mounted today. He sought to decenter the West in his exhibition, and he presented “platforms” in the year leading up to the opening of the main show that took the form of conferences, seminars, and other projects in nearby locales like Berlin and Vienna, as well as ones far away from Germany, like Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos. The artist list attested to an emphasis on Africa, Asia, and Latin America and their diasporas, with Zarina Bhimji, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Feng Mengbo, Issac Julien, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Gabriel Orozco, Raqs Media Collective, and Nari Ward among the participants. Enwezor’s Documenta also included a number of key works, including Maria Eichhorn’s Public Limited Company, Jeff Wall’s After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, Isuma’s Our Land, and On Kawara’s One Million Years. In granting African, Asian, and Latin American art such a prominent showcase, Enwezor turned Documenta—and the multitude of biennials that mine it for inspiration—into a global project.
Image: Okwui Enwezor (left) talking to politician Julian Nida-Ruemelin in front of a painting by US artist Leon Golub at Documenta 11 in June 2002.