The multitude, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s analysis, is distinguished from common notions of “the people,” “the masses,” or “the working class” and is rather “composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or single identity—different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires.” As a social multiplicity, this multitude politically and economically challenges the “network power” of a global imperial system that they define as “Empire.” See Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2004), xi–xvi.
Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” Documenta 11 (Hatje Cantz, 2002), 47.
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 48.
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 47.
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 47.
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 47.
Olu Oguibe, “A Brief Note on Internationalism,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (iniva and Kala Press, 1994), 54.
Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 73.
Basualdo cited in Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation,” 70.
We might also note here the wide adoption of the multiscreen video-installation and the essay-film as the privileged media formats of global contemporary cultural mediation in museum and biennial exhibition settings especially.
Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation,” 58.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Belknap Press, 1999), 462. Benjamin’s conception of the constellation is, in turn, elaborated and refracted with postcolonial theory through Arjun Appadurai and Édouard Glissant’s ruminations on planetary entanglement and the politics of difference. I have in mind Édouard Glissant’s notion of tout-monde (all-world), first evoked in his novel Mahogany (1987) and Arjun Appadurai’s thinking on globalization in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7, no. 2–3 (1990).
Enwezor defines Westernism as “that sphere of global totality that manifests itself through the political, social, economic, cultural, juridical, and spiritual integration achieved via institutions devised and maintained solely to perpetuate the influence of European and North American modes of being.” See “The Black Box,” 46.
See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012). Frantz Fanon defines decolonization as “an agenda for total disorder.” See Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1963), 2.
For some materialist-inflected accounts of indigenous resistance, see Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition; Kyle Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021); and Quito Swan, Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, 2022).
Rizvana Bradley also observes the “fetishistic circulation” of Glissant’s term in the art world, noting that his concept is usually figured as a “strategic evasion of the violence of the racial gaze or the racial regime of representation.” Bradley, however, ascribes an alternative, and arguably more generative, understanding to Glissantian opacity, framing it as “the terrifying and ruinous expression of irreducibility.” For Bradley, this opacity, which is “irreducibly material” and “exorbitant,” unsettles the constitutive delineations of visibility and invisibility, and the material and the semiotic. Bradley’s framing arms opacity with a blackened irruptive potency that forcefully unsettles the racial, colonial metaphysics of modern aesthetic regimes. See Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), 245.
Oguibe, “A Brief Note on Internationalism,” 57–58.
Okwui Enwezor, “Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on African Conceptualism,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum of Art, 1999).
Throughout his curatorial career, Enwezor remained a proponent of the possibilities of the (critical) documentary genre. These concerns with the ethical and political dimensions of the documentary mode were not only addressed in his Documenta edition in 2002 but also in exhibitions such as “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” at the International Center of Photography, New York, 2008. See also Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5, no. 1 (2004).
Boaventura de Sousa Santos importantly foregrounds the cognitive dimensions of Western imperial domination and makes an argument for the epistemological advancement of “cognitive justice.” See de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming Age of Epistemologies of the South (Duke University Press, 2018), 6. For a treatment on how globally diverse indigenous aesthetics might enact such palpable metaphysical decolonial critiques, see KJ Abudu, “Ciné-chronotones: Decolonial Temporal Critique in Contemporary Moving Image Practice,” Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023). For more critical analyses on raciality, modernity, and the (im)possibility of decolonial poiesis, see David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetic, (Fordham University Press, 2019); Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022); Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, unpublished manuscript, 1970; and Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (Africa World Press, 1992).
Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” e-flux journal, no. 120 (2021) →.
To offer one brief example of what such transformative possibilities might look like, we could turn to the work of philosopher Mogobe B. Ramose and his critical interrogation of the Bantu concept of Ubuntu and scholar Panashe Chigumadzi’s elaboration on the radical implications of Ramose’s Afri-Indigenous insights. See Ramose, African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Mond Book Publishers, 1999), 36–40; Panashe Chigumadzi, “Ubuntu: A Black Radical Demand for Reparations,” The Funambulist, no. 50 (2023).
Guinean Delegation, “The African Culture,” Souffles, no. 16–17 (1969–70).
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, Marx and Engels 1845–47 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 36.
“Philosophical” here need not imply rationalism nor logocentrism but expansively refers to a multisensorial array of thinking/feeling analytical devices.
Colectivo los Ingrávidos, “Thesis on the Audiovisual,” in Temporal Territories: An Anthology of Indigenous Experimental Cinema, ed. Sky Hopinka et al. (Light Industry, 2024).
For a sustained engagement with reason and its diverse conditions of emergence, see Emmanuel Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (Duke University Press, 2008); and Ato Sekyi-Otu, Left Universalism: Africacentric Essays (Routledge, 2019).
Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes that “the ecologies of knowledges are collective cognitive constructions led by the principles of horizontality (different knowledges recognize the differences between themselves in a nonhierarchical way) and reciprocity (differently incomplete knowledges strengthen themselves by developing relations of complementarity among one another). De Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, 78. For more on the philosophical nuances and problematics of intercultural translation, see de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2016); and Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Indiana University Press, 1996).
Nkiru Nzegwu, “African Aesthetics: Disrobing Modernism, Becoming Visible in History,” Traces of Ecstasy Symposium, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, March 29, 2024.
De Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire, 6, emphasis added.
Da Silva’s term “intrastructure” is inspired by Karen Barad’s notion of “intra-action.” See da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022), 28. The framework of “infrastructural critique,” which I’ve attempted to elaborate in this text in racial-capitalist and anti-colonial terms, is borrowed from Marina Vishmidt. See “Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (MIT Press).
My use of “Man” is borrowed from Sylvia Wynter and is meant to refer to a dominant Western bourgeois heteropatriarchal “genre” of the human, coming into being from the fifteenth century onwards, that “overrepresents” itself as if it were the only existent human genre. See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
In previous writings, I have modelled theoretical frameworks to consider the junctures of the hauntological and the historical conditions of contemporary African postcoloniality. See Living with Ghosts, ed. KJ Abudu (Pace Publishing, 2022). See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 1994); and Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Enwezor notes that “in comparing different types of modernity and in our attempts to describe their different characteristics, we are constantly confronted with the persistent tension between grand and petit modernity.” Here, grand modernity broadly refers to the Western Enlightenment’s master narrative of “individual liberty, political sovereignty, democratic forms of governance, capitalism, and so on.” See Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 596–97.
Enwezor, along with frequent collaborators such as the art historians Salah M. Hassan and Chika Okeke-Agulu, often spotlighted non-Western modernists in their editorial collaborations, providing in-depth studies and contextualizing frameworks in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art as well as the landmark publication Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Damiani, 2009). These postcolonial modernist artists also featured regularly in Enwezor’s exhibitions. Ngwenya and El-Salahi were included in “The Short Century”; Efflatoun’s works were exhibited in Enwezor’s Venice Biennale edition, “All the World’s Futures”; and Lam’s works were shown in Enwezor’s La Triennale edition, “Intense Proximity,” at the Palais de Tokyo in 2012.
Some recent exhibitions worth noting that buck these tendencies include “Sarah Maldoror: Cinéma Tricontinental” at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and “Avant-Garde and Liberation: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism” at mumok, Vienna.
See “The State of the African Art Market 2024,” ArtTactic, 2024 →.
Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 55.
Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” 59.
Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” 59.
Enwezor, “Statement of Okwui Enwezor: Curator of the 56th International Art Exhibition,” Venice Biennale, 2015; Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Duke University Press 2018), 110.
See “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition,” Artforum, November 2003, 158. See also Enwezor, “The Black Box,” 45. For a related study on genealogies of institutional critique and their convergences and divergences with decolonial praxis, see MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation: A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October, no. 165 (Summer 2018).
These artists, unlike some other Western-situated figures associated with the genealogy of institutional critique, exceeded provincialized, self-referential Eurocentric parameters by examining postcolonial global entanglements of commerce, culture, and politics, as well as their often violent and uneven conditions of possibility.
G.U.L.F is an autonomous offshoot of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition that was featured in the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2015, which Enwezor curated.
Global Ultra Luxury Faction, “On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers,” in Supercommunity: e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale, 2015.
Okwui Enwezor, “Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” Manifesta Journal, no. 2 (Winter 2003–Spring 2004), 119.
See →.
See →.
Enwezor, “Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” 107.
The fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial was organized by artistic directors Folakunle Oshun (the biennial’s founder) and Kathryn Weir.
Traces of Ecstasy is an ongoing curatorial project that was developed concurrently at two sites separated by the historically weighted distance of the Atlantic Ocean. Featuring Nolan Oswald Dennis, Evan Ifekoya, Raymond Pinto, Temitayo Shonibare, and Adeju Thompson/Lagos Space Programme, the project premiered as a site-responsive architectural pavilion and exhibition at the Lagos Biennial (February 3–10, 2024) and soon afterwards, as an expanded, recursive adaptation at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (February 16–July 14, 2024). Bridging African indigenous frontiers, queer methodologies, and decentralized digital technologies, the exhibition project seeks to reimagine alternative forms of African collectivity for the twenty-first century that exceed the nation-state model.
T. J. Demos raises an important question about how the insurgent energies and prefigurative politics produced by these alternative exhibition models might be transformed into enduring organizational forms. For Demos, the challenge remains as to how the “radical futurisms” embodied in such artistic and curatorial experiments might be sustained through “organizing long-lasting and multi-scalar bonds” while also not ossifying into hierarchical, power-affirming institutionalized structures. See Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2019), 168.
Exhibitions and cultural festivals on the African continent and its diasporas have long been animated by the liberatory intersections of cultural experimentation and anti-imperialist political struggle. The First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966, the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977, the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (1969–present), the Havana Biennial (1984–present), the Carthage Film Festival (1966–present), and numerous other exhibiting institutions were founded on the counter-hegemonic (often Pan-Africanist) premise of challenging Western (neo)colonial cultural and economic dominance.
Amílcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” Transitions, no. 45 (1974).
See Jonas Staal, “Propaganda (Art) Struggle,” e-flux journal, no. 94 (2018) →.
Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” 615.
Given Enwezor’s persistent concern with world-systems theory and globalization studies, I interpret his call to “disinherit” the violence of modernity as resonating with the economist Samir Amir’s framework on how Third World economies might “delink” from the tentacles of the capitalist world-system. See Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (Zed Books, 1990). Delinking, however, might also be conceptually expanded to refer to the realms of epistemology (see Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Duke University Press, 2018) and psychology (as in Frantz Fanon’s notion of “disalienation”; see Black Skin, White Masks, Pluto Press, 1986).
Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” 616.