Okwui Enwezor was born Okwuchukwu Emmanuel Enwezor in Calabar, Nigeria on October 23, 1963, and died in Munich, Germany on March 15, 2019.
Jason Farago, “Okwui Enwezor, Curator Who Remapped the Art World, Dies at 55,” New York Times, March 18, 2019.
Dorothee Richter and Donald Kolb, “Editorial: Decolonizing Art Institutions,” On Curating, no. 35 (December 2017): 6. Emphasis mine.
Richter and Kolb, “Editorial: Decolonizing Art Institutions,” 6.
American military power undergirded the expansion and reach of neoliberal corporations in their efforts to corral markets and minds in the global economy. For analysis, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Duke University Press, 2008).
I subscribe here to a canonical definition of fascism as “far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideologies and movements characterized by dictatorial leaders, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, and belief in a natural social hierarchy” usually based on notions of white supremacy →.
Hito Steyerl, Coco Fusco, Raqs Media Collective, and Supercommunity, “Remembering Okwui Enwezor,” e-flux journal, no 98 (March 2019) →.
Steyerl et al., “Remembering Okwui Enwezor.”
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Ordering the Universe: Documenta 11 and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze,” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005).
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker: A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in Contemporary African Art,” Art South Africa 9, no. 1 (Spring 2010).
Giverna Addis, “Okwui Enwezor’s Impact—(Southern) African Contemporary Art in the International Art Market from 2015 to 2020,” in The Art Market and the Global South, ed. Adelaide Duarte and Marta Perez-Ibanez (Brill, 2023).
I am grateful to Reilly Clark for this insight about the impact of financial speculation on contemporary African art.
Scott Reyburn, “Neoliberalism Is Distorting How We See Art—Is There No Alternative?” The Art Newspaper, February 2, 2021 →.
Jason Waite, “Unsettled Ghosts in Ex-Africa: Okwui Enwezor’s Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville,” e-flux journal, no. 149, November 2024 →.
Anne Garland Mahler, “Global South,” in Oxford Bibliographies, October 25, 2017 →.
Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003).
Beth Duff-Brown, “How Has Africa Largely Evaded the COVID-19 Pandemic?” Stanford Health Policy, April 27, 2022 →.
Okwui Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Damiani, 2009), 11.
Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Steidl, 2006). See my review of the exhibition this book derives from in Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Critique of Specular Reason: Contemporary African Photography in the Global Context,” History of Photography 31, no. 4 (Winter 2007).
Stacy Vorster, “Negotiating Africanness: A Response to Sylvester Ogbechie” (master’s thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 2011).
John and Jean Comaroff, “Theory from the South: Or How Europe Is Evolving Toward Africa,” Anthropological Forum 22, no. 2 (2012).
Valeriya Safronova, “Mismanagement, and a Scientology Scandal, Blamed in Munich Museum Chief’s Ouster,” New York Times, October 17, 2018.
Joseph Underwood, “Always Emerging, Never Established: Africa’s Presence at the 2016 Armory Show,” Another Africa, May 6, 2016.
Arjun Appadurai argues that in the neoliberal age, financial markets are the new sites of the auratic. He criticizes the reduction of art first to commodities and then to financialized derivatives that encourage speculation. Arjun Appadurai, “Art under Neoliberalism,” Art Margins 10, no. 3 (October 2021) →.
