A new two-volume collection of writings reveals how the late Nigerian curator and critic Okwui Enwezor fundamentally reshaped the contemporary art world by challenging Western-centric perspectives and creating space for global voices. The comprehensive edition, titled "Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings," spans over a thousand pages and documents the evolution of one of the most influential figures in modern art history from 1994 to 2019.
Enwezor, who was born in Calabar, Nigeria, in 1963 and died in 2019 due to illness, wore many hats throughout his career as a poet, writer, curator, theorist, educator, and museum director. His work represented what could be called "world-building" in the truest sense – not creating fictional alternatives but actively reshaping how we see and experience art in our globalized world. As he wrote in 2007, his key interest was "rooted in the examination of artistic differencing through a form of curatorial counterinsurgency."
The collected writings, edited by Terry Smith and published by Duke University Press, demonstrate how Enwezor worked to create what he called "an enlarged global public sphere." This sphere was specifically designed to move beyond Western colonial frameworks and embrace the fluid, hybrid nature of a globalizing world dealing with postcolonial realities alongside accelerating capitalism and neoliberalism. Curator Hoor Al-Qasimi describes this approach as extending beyond traditional Western colonial ways of understanding art and culture.
When Enwezor began his career in the 1990s, the international art world looked dramatically different from today. It was significantly smaller, with fewer biennials and art fairs, and art history was predominantly taught through a narrow Western lens that often ignored global histories of colonialism and racism. The dominant art establishment took for granted that art history was centered in the West and systematically disregarded non-Western perspectives.
Enwezor's first major statement came in 1994 with the inaugural issue of "Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art," which he co-founded with Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, and Chika Okeke-Agulu. In that founding editorial, he wrote passionately about "the pervasive absence in these highly policed environments, of art by contemporary African artists" in museums and galleries across Europe and the United States. He argued that these artists were not only absent from museum spaces but had also "been accorded little attention of significance in academic art historical practices, university curriculums, the print media, or other organs of such reportage."
The breakthrough moment that would define Enwezor's legacy came when he was selected to curate Documenta 11 in 2002. This prestigious quinquennial exhibition, established in Germany after World War II, had traditionally focused on exhibitions in its home city of Kassel. Instead, Enwezor completely reimagined the project by creating what he called "five platforms" that unfolded through intensive lectures and conferences across four global locations: Vienna and Berlin, New Delhi, the West Indies, and Lagos, all culminating in the final exhibition in Kassel.
This radical restructuring was designed to frame the exhibition as a "diagnostic toolbox" that would "actively seek to stage the relationships, conjunctions, and disjunctions between different realities: between artists, institutions, disciplines, genres, generations, processes, forms, media, activities; between identity and subjectification." The approach was initially met with criticism from the press, with some questioning its ambition and composition. David Galloway wrote in The New York Times that most of the show's "Third World participants live in Europe or America and have frequently lent an exotic touch to international exhibitions."
Despite early skepticism, Documenta 11 proved transformative and launched the careers of many artists who would go on to shape 21st-century art, including Renée Green, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Doris Salcedo, and Raqs Media Collective. The exhibition became a model for curatorial studies and demonstrated Enwezor's method of embedding art within larger historical, political, and cultural currents.
Enwezor's approach consistently challenged what he saw as "suffocating enclosures" created by traditional dichotomies such as First/Third World, Center/Periphery, Black/White, and High/Low. He argued that there were "too many complex dynamics attending to the varieties of cultural production in Africa, and in fact throughout the world, to allow for the erection of such suffocating enclosures." Art historian Kobena Mercer described Enwezor as embodying "a kind of critical cosmopolitanism."
Another landmark exhibition was "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994," which opened in 2001 at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich. This show provided what Enwezor called "a critical biography of Africa" by focusing on the continent's decolonization process. The exhibition incorporated visual art alongside sound, music, theater, posters, and other cultural documents, narrating political and cultural movements including Modernism, Negritude, and Pan-Africanism.
Enwezor's fascination with cultural documents, particularly photography, led to several influential exhibitions during his time as adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art" (2008) explored how artists use archives as materials, taking its title from Jacques Derrida's work. "Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life" (2012) featured nearly 500 photographs, films, literature, and magazines documenting apartheid in South Africa and the movement to dismantle it.
In his analysis of the apartheid exhibition, Enwezor provided what the collection describes as "surgical analysis" of how photographic culture fueled anti-apartheid protests. He examined works like Margaret Bourke-White's 1948 photograph for Life magazine, which captured "a white man standing by a large ornamental plinth outside the Johannesburg City Hall on which the defiant words 'God is Black' had been chalked," demonstrating how the image appeared "to upend the power dynamics embedded in the public space."
Throughout his career, which included serving as director of Haus der Kunst in Munich from 2011 to 2018, Enwezor curated major biennials including Johannesburg (1997) and Venice (2015). His perspective evolved from what the collection describes as "a more hopeful, sanguine view of a gathering world in the 90s" to one that "lucidly analyzes the crises of this new neoliberal era and the partly technological problem of intense proximity that prompted the rising authoritarianism and creeping nihilism of the 2010s."
The two-volume collection reveals how Enwezor expanded the art world canon alongside larger trends including globalization and the evolution of biennials. His legacy represents what editor Terry Smith calls "an open work in progress, across multilayered platforms, for the many worlds to come, all of them postcolonial." The writings encourage readers to see contemporary art not as a break from the past but as "a complex storm of past histories, old habits, and new possibilities that surround and inform art," providing tools and methods that continue to influence curators and artists working to create a more inclusive and globally representative art world.
