In the Kingdoms of Ruin: Okwui Enwezor, Contemporary Art, and the Global South

1.

One early afternoon in 1995, I met with Okwui Enwezor and another colleague at a café near NYU to discuss possibilities afforded by the increasing visibility of contemporary African art.1 We were attending the 10th Triennial Symposium of the Arts Council for African Studies Association where, for the first time in its history, more papers were presented on modern and contemporary African art than precolonial-era artworks. Enwezor had just published the first issue of NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art in late 1994, and there was much excitement about its positive reception. Soon afterwards, he was appointed curator of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale and later, director of Documenta 11 (2002). Between Documenta 11 and his appointment as director of the 2015 Venice Biennale, Enwezor became one of the most significant curators of contemporary art. When he passed away in 2019, he was universally eulogized as a “curator who remapped the art world.”2

Three decades on from our New York kaffeeklatsch, art from Africa and the Global South has become a crucial part of global contemporary art. At the same time, the global art world has proven to be an extremely contradictory field, cultivating “an exchange that transcends the boundaries between cultures and continents through so-called global museums or globally operating art biennials and festivals, at least for a certain audience able to travel around the globe.”3 And yet, “a certain perspective of the Western history of art and culture claims primacy over global contemporary art and especially its markets.”4 Enwezor operated within this contested terrain and navigated its contradictions with intellectual brilliance and panache, achieving fame for his unique approach to curating and impeccable sense of style. He created groundbreaking exhibitions that deconstructed Eurocentric artistic paradigms. He advocated for, and performed, a more inclusive and transnational perspective that accentuated the voices of marginalized artists from diverse regions. However, due to inherent tensions between his political aspirations and the limitations posed by global art institutions where he worked, his curatorial protocols often unwittingly reinforced the existing Western-centric hierarchies, and even diluted the activist potential of Global South artists by transforming critical sociopolitical issues into aesthetic representations within the commodified spaces of biennials. 

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, film still. Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery

We can now read Enwezor’s curatorial practice within the three-decades-long era of globalization bounded by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020—pivotal events that transformed artistic and curatorial practice while ironically accelerating Western hegemony and its consolidation of art-world power. In this regard, certain questions arise: How does the demise of globalization allow us to rethink the central premises on which Enwezor based his work: nomadic epistemology, the ideal of the independent curator, and trans-territoriality? How have these ideas impacted our understanding of contemporary African art and Global South aspirations? What are their effects on discourse, artistic practice, and contexts of production?

In retrospect, Enwezor’s curatorial methodology suffered from a fundamental error in commenting on globalization without reflecting on its grotesque underpinning: American military power in the service of unchecked neoliberal capital after the end of the Cold War.5 As errors of judgment go, this one was severe. It reduced the world to theory and theorized as if its inhabitants were free agents unencumbered by any constraints other than their devotion to individualism. An “individual” thus freed might act as if the world order emanated from their own particularity and desires. Yet in our present era after globalization and after Covid-19, we clearly see a reversal of fortunes and contestations in the Global South. Civil rights are under assault in the United States; the global art market is increasingly consolidated under a few powerful collectors, mega-galleries, curators, and auction houses; and right-wing extremists—fascists, in a literal sense of the term—have overtaken the Western political order.6

Mourning Enwezor’s death in 2019, Hito Steyerl noted that the curator strove for “a more complex, more nuanced, more challenging world by acknowledging more colors, different sounds, and unknown beauty in between the trodden stereotypes designed to rule and conquer.”7 Steyerl also suggested that uncritical championing of globalization by curators and scholars glossed over its ties to corporate interests and to feudal-minded or plainly authoritarian Western and non-Western elites. Enwezor was keenly aware of this contradiction and its impact on global affairs: the first thirty pages of his catalogue for Documenta 11 were filled with stark images of conflict—armed men and women, dislocated populations, and devastating sites of violence. Equally horrific images of mass incarceration, Black men slaughtered by law-enforcement officers, and millions dead in corporate theaters of war suffuse the contemporary media landscape. In these kingdoms of ruin, these shattered sites of spatial and temporal dislocation, Enwezor’s curatorial practice unfolded within a model of globalization that championed cultural difference and the representation of marginalized constituencies at the expense of economic, juridical, and political justice.8 Throughout his career, Enwezor was appointed to major institutions in the West such as universities, biennials, and museums. Given how large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art are beholden to Euro-American corporate sponsorship, the idea that he was an “independent” curator is entirely notional.

2.

In the past three decades, I have defended Enwezor’s stewardship of Documenta 11 for its robust representation of the Global South in contemporary art.9 I have also criticized his curatorial modalities for decentering Africa as a site of globalization that developed unique strategies of visual representation to engage its transnational and transcultural location. I identified Enwezor as a culture broker and called for greater evaluation of how his interventions shaped the discourse of contemporary African art.10

A culture broker is a person who facilitates the border-crossing of another person or group of people from one culture to another. In financial terms, a broker is a middleman or intermediary agent—an interpreter, messenger, or commissioner. In this regard, Enwezor worked within the art-world establishment as an interpreter and mediator of African contemporary art to Western institutions. These art institutions (including the one where Enwezor was last appointed, the Haus Der Kunst in Munich) affirm their noncommercial focus by not dealing directly with the selling of artwork while, at the same time, brokering their emergence as commodities in the global art market. The impact of such brokerage is evident in the value of artworks by artists Enwezor frequently exhibited in the first two decades of his career. In this regard, his curatorial practice elevated contemporary African artists within the global discourse of art while simultaneously delivering their art to capitalism’s voracious appetite for new commodities.

Dawit L. Petros, Untitled (Prologue II), from the series The Stranger‘s Notebook, 2016. Courtesy the artist and courtesy Tiwani Contemporary, London

Indeed, we can track the increase in demand for African contemporary art in the wake of Enwezor’s ascent.11 Also, in the wake of African-American protests against ongoing police brutality in 2020, the largely white community of art collectors and museum professionals began feverishly and publicly patronizing Black artists. Many African and African diaspora artists who focused on the Black figure, such as Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, saw explosive sales. New speculative, secondary markets for artworks by Black figurative painters emerged. Dealers, collectors, and curators all profited from the sale and resale of these artworks while the artists mostly did not. Worse still, many artists lost control of their pricing power as the speculative markets for their work crested then crashed.12 As Scott Reyburn lamented, neoliberalism has distorted how we see art. “Art is financial commodity. Artists are brands, ranked by price. Collectors are ranked by power. The art world is all about data, the data of names and numbers. Artists are reduced to winners or losers. Most are losers.”13

It is with concern for this exploitation of African contemporary artists in the neoliberal order that I faulted Enwezor’s curatorial practice for not engaging the art market as a site of neocolonial control, and also for legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispensed with the African continent itself as a historical theater of contemporary art and visual culture. This stance, I argued, evacuated Africans from the sites of their engagements with global contemporaneity and thus coopted the curator into a system that allowed for more representation without any fundamental changes to hegemonic power structures. Jason Waite notes, in this regard, that Enwezor’s exhibitions were directed to “global society” and often reflected one-way communication to an intended public rooted in Euro-American biases, racial prejudices, and fixed canons.14 This is not to say Enwezor did not focus on Africa, but rather that his interpretation favored contemporary African artists whose visual languages reflected New York–centric formal and conceptual protocols.

3.

The other key frameworks of Enwezor’s curatorial practice are nomadic epistemology and trans-territoriality. Both concepts emphasize how global economic restructuring, migratory flows, and deterritoriality undermined assumptions about the fixity of contemporary artists in the period between the end of the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, “critical scholarship that falls under the rubric Global South is invested in the study of subjectivity, power and racialization within global capitalism in ways that transcend the nation-state as the unit of comparative analysis.”15 However, art and curatorial practice unfold within tangible geographical, economic, and sociopolitical spaces that shape historical conditions. Enwezor’s practice unfolded within a “global” space already coded as white and Western, which limited its effectiveness. In his influential text “The Postcolonial Constellation,” he emphasized that contemporary postcolonial artists actively negotiate the complexities of identity, nationhood, and history in ways that reflect the fractured and contested realities of their societies, and through these, engage various publics.16 But which societies and which publics?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, nomadic epistemology tripped on the harsh reality of nations closing their borders and compelling everyone to shelter in place. I had once quipped that no one actually lives in global space, and the pandemic made that evident. It exposed the ability to freely travel the world as a privilege available to a select few and showed how race and class distinctions determined who claimed the advantages of transnational mobility. The pandemic also laid bare the inequities of global capitalism. The wealth gap grew to astronomical proportions and societies started to slowly fragment under the weight of inequality. The extent of the corporate capture of the art world became obvious in how art was funded and marketed. More importantly, the pandemic exposed inequities between Western nations and the Global South in matters such as the distribution of vaccines. In this regard, Euro-American commentators expected the Covid-19 pandemic to devastate Africa. Instead, African countries largely evaded the crisis, prompting questions about how that was possible.17 In the debate that ensued, no one argued over whether Africa was a geographical or conceptual location; everyone seemed sure of where and to whom they referred when it came to Africa and Africans.

Throughout his career, Enwezor posited that “Africa is not to be understood in ethnocentric, national, regional, or even continental terms alone, but as a network of positions, affiliations, strategies, and philosophies that represent the multiplicity of cultural traditions and archives exploited by artists to shape their positions.”18 I agree with Enwezor that postcolonial identities are neither fixed geographically nor limited by ethnicity and are diffused through temporal networks that defy locality and self, community and nation. However, it is also true that “defiance of locality” is itself a marker of privilege that is not available to the vast bulk of Africans whose movement into Western locales is constrained by legal protocols and outright hostility. In spite of these constraints, Africa was already and always global(ized). Curators need to see Africa as a site of globalization and explore the historical specificity and circumstances through which Africans engage globalization and contemporaneity. The internet and social media are key tools in this process, providing Africans with platforms to share their voices, ideas, and traditions with the world. They allow African artists, filmmakers, and musicians to challenge stereotypes and present alternative narratives about Africa that counter the historical representations of poverty, war, and underdevelopment that Enwezor aptly described as “Afro-pessimism.”19 Through such means, artists affirm a global Africa rooted in a multiplicity of identities and experiences.

Stacy Vorster has pointed out that one might criticize my position for focusing too much on physical mobility across borders rather than the more abstract sense of heightened interconnectivity between people and cultures.20 New technologies have indeed made it possible for Africans to see, interact, and communicate with different peoples and ideas. Still, we need to evaluate how people in particular spaces engage this multiplicity of locations. Yes, artists on the African continent can access global media through their ubiquitous smartphones, yet they are often barred from participating in international events through legal protocols that fix them in place. Yes, many contemporary African artists live and work in various parts of the world, but those African artists who live on the continent are often denied visas to travel abroad and are limited to virtual engagement with other sites of globalization. In this regard, the inflamed rhetoric of contemporary theories of Blackness is directly proportional to the loss of Black power on the global stage as current political trends worldwide unravel hard-won civil, political, and economic rights. 

If we think of modern African artists as agents of cultural translation who enunciated modernist positions through appeals to Indigenous identities, contemporary African artists are transnational and agentic actors who engage with the global art world through various modalities. We should be interested in how their art reflects an expanded awareness of their location in Africa, if they live and work there, or in the Euro-American contexts that they often relocate to in an effort to gain greater visibility for their work. Privileging one aspect (the Euro-American context masquerading as global), as Enwezor did, contributes to an effacement of the other. Late in his career, Enwezor considered a more active engagement with contemporary art on the African continent. Unfortunately, his death cut short what might have been.

4.

The global pandemic showed that a geographical idea of Africa and Africanness is not retrogressive, but rather encourages us to probe the possibilities and limits of deterritoriality. African identities are and have always been multiracial and multiethnic. Thus I do not see Africa as a natural concept that is essential, immutable, or fixed in its geographical location, racial identity, or temporality. It is also true that millions of Africans now live in many corners of the globe, from which they engage with or contest their identification as African—which does not invalidate the lived experience of Africans of whatever ethnicity or race on the African continent. Against globalization’s conceit of radical nomadism as the keystone of contemporaneity, we must argue for the concrete nature of those spaces in which human beings coded as Africans live and engage in divergent modes of contemporary art practice. If we agree with Enwezor that Africa is an invented concept that may be constructed and transacted in a number of different ways for a number of different publics, then we must equally accept that Europe is a construct, as is “contemporary art” and every other designation meant to circumscribe a population, polity, or practice. No classification is natural, thus there is no reason to marginalize the African continent on the basis of such criticism.

Wangechi Mutu, Intertwined, 2023. New Museum, New York.

My point is that African cultural identities reflect modes of world-making through which Africans engage with their historical experiences and contemporary existence. It includes aspects of the continent’s history of global interactions past and present. In this regard, the Global South, particularly Africa, is an increasingly crucial site for understanding the global condition and the future of the world, both socially and intellectually.21 Okwui Enwezor’s legacy is located within this struggle to mainstream the Global South in contemporary art and its discourses. He challenged established narratives of curatorial practice and art history, which have often been dominated by Western-centric views. He proposed an alternative model of critical engagement that took into account the multifaceted experiences of postcolonial artists who engage with complex legacies of imperialism, globalization, and national identity. Enwezor affirmed that contemporary art in general, as well as art from postcolonial contexts, cannot be understood in isolation but rather must be seen as part of broader, transnational conversations about power, identity, and resistance. However, his idealistic vision of the world was beholden to the very forces of Western hegemony that he contested.

5.

It is interesting that despite his investment in an ideal of the curator as nomad, Enwezor carried a marker of African ethnic identity with him throughout his career. His first name, Okwui—a diminutive of his Igbo name Okwuchukwu—is one of three unique Igbo names (Okwuchukwu, Okwudili, and Okwunodu) found within a thirty-mile radius of the city of Onitsha in the lower River Niger region. He and I shared that diminutive, since I am named Okwunodu, hence also Okwui. An Igbo adage holds that one must first secure space/ground before worrying about securing a mat (a gha zotagodu ana, e we zoba ute)—the corollary being that if you secure a space, you can always sleep on the ground even if you have no mat. The opposite is not true; if you have a mat and no space/ground, you have nowhere to sleep at all.

Okwui Enwezor with Sylvester Okwunodu (Okwui) Ogbechie at the Opening Reception of Documenta XI, Kassel, 2002.

Enwezor deserves immense credit for securing space for contemporary African art in the discourse of global contemporary art. He deserves to be commended for shouldering the exorbitant expectations of both the mainstream art world and its marginalized constituencies. However, rather than enhance Global South ownership of spaces of discourse, his work merely promoted participation and increased representation in it. Also, his focus on international visibility sometimes overshadowed the intimate connections of art to particular contexts, thus distancing art from the communities it was intended to represent and glossing over salient points of historical specificity.  

As Hito Steyerl noted, the world that Okwui Enwezor dreamed of and worked for was already falling apart by the time of his death, and his legacy is being destroyed by those same nationalist and corrupt forces that destroy art worlds everywhere. Enwezor was forced out of his post at Haus der Kunst in 2018, a victim of revanchist Bavarian nationalism.22 In this regard, recent political events in Western nations do not bode well for the Global South even as efforts continue to build counterpoints to Euro-American control of the global art world. There are limits to representation and it would be easy for this present moment to fall into the usual cycle of recognition afforded to African art in the West, as a context that is always emerging but never established.23

I applaud Enwezor’s interventions in the exhibition and discourse of contemporary African art, but I also posit that the struggle before us is no longer about representation but ownership. Art history and curatorial methodologies must pursue granular histories of Global South sites of contemporary art, bearing in mind the expansive definition of postcolonial identities that Enwezor championed. They should promote border crossings of all kinds (the free movement of peoples and ideas that globalization promised but failed to deliver) while paying equal attention to the particularities of place. They must contest the power of mega-galleries and ask hard questions about hegemony, markets, and the creation of value in the global art world. Above all, they need to deconstruct the reduction of art labor to financialization as new computational methodologies further shift the art world towards abstract modes of thinking about art as data.24 This would honor Enwezor’s legacy and extend the work he devoted his life to.