THE RECONSTRUCTOR: How Okwui Enwezor Changed the Art World

Okwui Enwezor photographed by Juergen Teller at the London offices of architect David Adjaye. Image via  WSJ.com.

Next year, the Nigerian-born curator and writer will become the first African director of the Venice Biennale, where he’ll continue his career-long project of challenging the status quo

Text | Zeke Turner for The Wall Street Journal

Published | September 8, 2014

Excerpts: 

Since his 1996 breakthrough as a curator of In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to Present, an exhibit of 30 African photographers at the Guggenheim Museum, Okwui Enwezor has alternated between ambitious international exhibitions that seek to define their moment—biennials in Johannesburg, Gwangju and beyond, along with the Paris Triennale in 2012—and historically driven, encyclopedic museum shows centered on topics such as African liberation movements in the 20th century, the arc of apartheid and the use of archive material in contemporary art. Enwezor is the first curator of his generation and the second ever to command two of Europe's most precious cultural territories—Documenta, the five-yearly exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and now the Venice Biennale—and the first African to direct either one. 

In/Sight was one of the first shows anywhere to put contemporary art from Africa in the historical and political context of colonial withdrawal and the emergence of independent African states. Its success led to Enwezor’s appointment as the curator of the second Johannesburg Bienniale in 1996. Enwezor used that platform to show that he could not only execute a biennial but could curate shows around big ideas. Deploying the idea of trade routes, he theatrically changed the terms of the show, bringing in a team of international curators. “I didn’t want to do an African show; I wanted to do an international show,” he says.

 "He's a towering figure who really believes in dealing with the misrepresentation of history," says British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye. "Okwui is a unique character in the sense that his experience of globalization and the way he sees the world have created who he is."

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IN PRINT: Okwui Enwezor in conversation with Matthew Barney / Modern Painters / April 2014

Matthew Barney and Okwui Enwezor at Barney's studio, December 2013. Photo by Keith Riley.

These Weary Territories

A Conversation Between Matthew Barney and Okwui Enwezor

On a frigid December morning in 2013, a production on Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler’s seven-year project, River of Fundament – loosely based on Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings – was wrapping up, Barney sat down with Okwui Enwezor and the editors of Modern Painters for a conversation in the artist’s studio in Long Island City, New York. Enwezor is director of the 2015 Venice Biennale and the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, where the exhibition “River of Fundament” is on view through August 17, 2014.

MODERN PAINTERS: How did you come together on this project?

OKWUI ENWEZOR: I had wanted to work with Matthew years ago when I did Documenta 11, in 2002, but circumstances prevented it. Then in 2011 I went to see Matthew’s exhibition “DJED” at Gladstone Gallery, and for me it became really obvious that I wanted to know more about the development of the piece. Rosalie Benitez sent me information. I had just taken the position as director of Haus der Kunst, and that was the first project that I said I wanted to do.

MP: And where did the project itself begin?

MATTHEW BARNEY: With a conversation with Norman Mailer, about Ancient Evenings. I wasn’t familiar with this book at all. It was critically panned, an although I think he considered it essential, it wasn’t considered essential critically. Mailer said to me, “You should read this. There’s possibly something in there for you.” This was shortly before he died, and the estate at that point was reaching out to filmmakers to work with different Mailer books. Ancient Evenings was probably the odd one out. And so a conversation started at a time when I wasn’t really thinking about filmmaking, having lost my interest during the production of Drawing Restraint 9. Jonathan Bepler and I started talking about working together in a live capacity, with a structure like opera, and along came this text. We needed a text tow work with a libretto, and so we started looking at Ancient Evenings. It has something in it structurally that appealed to me very much, a lot of shifts between the body and the landscape, shifts in scale and time – things that I found easy to like that said, the text came with these seemingly impossible challenges of dealing so directly with Egyptian mythology. All of the frontal sexuality in the book felt like another problem that I wasn’t interested in. So there were a number of things that I didn’t like about it. But I liked the challenge, and that’s where the project started.

Matthew Barney photographed by Ari Marcopoulos in Long Island City, NY, 2014.

To read complete conversation pick up a copy of the April 2014 issue of Modern Painters on newsstands now. 

MEDIA NEWS: Okwui Enwezor Appointed Director of 56th Venice Biennale

Okwui Enwezor photographed by Bjorn Iooss. Image via Vogue.it. 

From blogs.artinfo.com, December 4, 2013:

Okwui Enwezor, director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, has been appointed Director of Visual Arts for the 56th Venice Biennale, which is to take place from May 9 to November 22, 2015. The 50-year-old Nigerian-born curator and writer previously served as artistic director of the Documenta 11 in 2002, the Bienial Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla in 2006, the  Gwangju Biennial in 2008, and the Triennal d’Art Contemporain of Paris at the Palais de Tokyo in 2012. From 2005 to 2009 he was dean of academic affairs and senior vice president of the San Francisco Art Institute.

“We … turn to a person who has a great many experiences to his name, with an ample history of activities and studies in a wide range of topics concerning art,” said Paolo Baratta, chairman of the Board of Directors of la Biennale di Venezia. “Enwezor has investigated, in particular, the complex phenomenon of globalization in relation to local roots. His personal experience is a decisive starting point for the geographic range of his analysis, for the temporal depth of recent developments in the art world, and for the variegated richness of the present,” Baratta continued.

“No event or exhibition of contemporary art has continuously existed at the confluence of so many historical changes across the fields of art, politics, technology, and economics, as la Biennale di Venezia,” Okwui Enwezor stated after his appointment. “La Biennale di Venezia is the ideal place to explore all of these dialectical fields of reference, and the institution of la Biennale itself will be a source of inspiration in planning the Exhibition.”

Enwezor’s work engages in African, European, Asiatic, North and South American art of the 20th and 21st Century, in modern and contemporary art of the African countries and the contemporary art of the African diaspora.

Enwezor follows Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni, whose 55th Biennale and critically acclaimed exhibition “The Encyclopedic Palace” ended in November with over 475,000 visitors.

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The Board of Directors appoints Okwui Enwezor Director of the Visual Arts Sector

PROFILE: Okwui Enwezor / Under the Influence / Fall -Winter 2012

Okwui Enwezor photographed by Lydia Gorges via undertheinfluencemagazine.tumblr.com

Renowned curator explains why he's under the influence of contemporary African Art

Interview by Alice Pfeiffer

Photography by Lydia Gorges

Excerpt:

In the early nineties, a Nigerian-born political science graduate, Okwui Enwezor, created the Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art from his Brooklyn apartment. It was dedicated to promoting vibrant artists from his continent of origin -- which at the time played a diminishing role in the western contemporary art scene. Today, Enwezor is considered one the the world's leading experts on the topic of contemporary African art. The director of Munich's Haus der Kunst, he recently curated Paris' Trienniale, and has art-directed art projects ranging form Documenta 11, to Johannesburg's and Gawngju's biennials, as well as shows for the Guggenheim, MoMA and the Tate Modern, to name a few. Interested in ideas of exile, identity and processes of truth formation, he continues to teach worldwide and publish extensively. Under the Influence and Enwezor discussed problems surrounding the notion of nationality, the dialectic between a physical and intangible sense of self -- and why Beyoncé can keep dancing however she pleases.

You've been nicknamed 'Mr. African Art' by journalists, is that an 'unofficial' title you're pleased with, or do you hope people will see beyond that?

No, I don't want people to see beyond that. I am very proud to be associated with such a nickname, even though I believe it is misapplied. But I have to ask the obverse question: Why is it that people always want to see being attached to Africa as a limitation? It's a very big continent; from Nigeria to South Africa is a nine-hour flight. We need, however, to be very careful in the way we pose the question. Thought I was born and raised in Nigeria, and setting aside for the moment my personal identity as an African -- from a purely professional view contemporary African art is one of my areas of specialisation, from an intellectual and disciplinary standpoint. I'm immensely proud to be an expert in this field, which is where I've invested 25 years of research, writing, curating, publishing, and teaching, so I do think it's important. I'm not however, 'Mister Africa' in the sense in which I suspect that the frame is applied. I do want my work and ideas to be understood in a specific professional context as taking Africa as a point of departure into other artistic and cultural worlds that define contemporary art today. I hope this issue of the magazine also comes with a self-interrogation of why Africa is suddenly in vogue. I'm fascinated by the recent rise of Africa and afrophilia in European magazines, such as L'Uomo Vogue (Africa issue May 2012 'Rebranding Africa'), and especially with the fact that Ban-Ki Moon was on the cover.

What is the golden thread between your curatorial and academic projects?

My beginning was militant, I was not ready to accept the fact that working on Africa was inherently a lack. The point was to confound the idea of Africa as a limit. When I founded the magazine Nka nearly 20 years ago, which I still publish, contemporary African art didn't even exist in the New York-American context as part of serious discourse. Maintaining that disciplinary insurgency was very important to me, and has remained in the way I think of that relationship between contemporary art and the global state of the world at large. The disciplinary insurgency is important because the institutional practice oftentimes is unable to make room for numerous thoughts that are just as relevant and can be tested against the prevailing judgment.

One has to make that happen. There are artists working in Mumbai, in China, in Africa that deserve consideration even if their critical language might not be transparently obvious to the settled grammar of the west.

But you have to do that with good faith, on a sense of inquiry and of discovery, not simply as an ideological exploitation of that relationship in response to western cultural arrogance, what could be called the ethnocentrism of superiority. Being a museum director in Europe, I cannot absolutely say that sense of disciplinary insurgency, the way it was when I started, still remains -- but it's still part of the backdrop of my thinking, in order that I do not become too settled in what I call dead certainties.

To read complete interview, pick up a copy of Under the Influence magazine's Africa Issue on newsstands or order online here.

Under the Influence magazine on tumblr.