Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8971300
Susette S. Min
In 2012, Okwui Enwezor was appointed artistic director of the third iteration of La Triennale, which he titled Intense Proximité (IP). While Enwezor had the credentials to legitimize the French art scene, he was also keenly aware of his own revolving roles as guest and host. This article considers his exhibition-making practice within the context of hospitality. Conventionally, hospitality entails warmly welcoming guests to make themselves at home. This interaction between guest and host involves not only implicit codes of etiquette and manners but also an economy of exchange that revolves around constant transaction and negotiation. In general, a curator’s duties are similar to those of a host in setting up the conditions to welcome a diverse array of artists, ideas, and viewers into a designated space. Keeping in mind how curating, in the words of Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton, is also “a kind of intimate, intersubjective, interrelational obligation,” Enwezor never presumed his role as positionality to be sovereign. The first half of the article introduces the concept of hospitality and sets up Enwezor’s curatorial premise of IP. The second half mobilizes his curatorial practice as a means to open up ways to reconceive hospitality as a site of interruption, absolution, and abolition, and it reaffirms scholarship that conceives Enwezor’s exhibition making as a decolonial practice.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8971257
Natasha Becker
Abstract:This article takes a critical and intimate look at Okwui Enwezor's work in South Africa during the 1990s and asserts that the international exhibition he curated in Johannesburg in 1997—the Second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography—is an important lens through which to explore Africa's entangled histories. Trade Routes mattered as much for the discourse it produced as for the artworks it presented. The exhibition checklist features extraordinary works that were made between 1989 and 1997 by artists whose critical acclaim we take for granted today but who were at that time still underappreciated or emerging. Trade Routes not only challenged the status of the existing canon on African art but also proposed a new counter-canon. Additionally, Trade Routes and Enwezor's concept of the meeting of worlds might have greater analytical potential as a metaphor for the meeting point of two indecipherable South Africas. Under apartheid, Johannesburg was two "countries," and people lived in two different realities, depending on one's history, geography, race, ethnicity, class, gender, culture, education, and opportunities. Enwezor constantly confronted the legacy of racism in small and big ways in South Africa. He was at the center of critical debates about race and representation. While there are all kinds of practical guidelines for how to talk about racism within the larger culture, we still do not have one for talking about racial inequality and racism in institutions, exhibition histories, curatorial practice, and the commercial art world. Instead, we have Okwui Enwezor to accompany us on our quest and to remind us to keep consulting both histories and imaginaries, theories and practices, and to continue to interrogate how cycles are reproduced or radically ruptured.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8971342
Mary Ellen Strom, S. Doyle
Abstract:The multimedia exhibition Cherry River, Where the Rivers Mix was presented to audiences in August 2018 at the Missouri Headwaters State Park in Three Forks, Montana. Long before the European invasion across the Atlantic, the headwaters, or the confluence of three forks of the Missouri River, was a crossroads for Northern Plains Indians. The place-based project, Cherry River, created by artist Mary Ellen Strom and Native American researcher Shane Doyle, was produced by Mountain Time Arts, a collaborative arts and culture organization in southwestern Montana. In an effort to analyze the site, Mountain Time Arts convened a diverse group of participants. Their research question became, What does it take to change the name of a river? After six months of research, the project centered on the act of changing the name of the East Gallatin River back to the Indigenous Crow name Cherry River. The name Cherry River honors and describes the numerous chokecherry trees growing on the river's banks that provide sustenance for wildlife and venerates Indigenous history, the ecology of running water, and riparian systems in the Northwest. The rise of interest in the rights of Indigenous people in North America aligns with many of Okwui Enwezor's groundbreaking initiatives around the world. This assemblage of images, poetry, and first-person narratives is an example of the kind of practice in dialogue with the legacy of Enwezor's decolonial actions and innovative use of curatorial strategies in several groundbreaking exhibitions to confront the "complex predicaments of contemporary art in a time of profound historical change and global transformation." While Enwezor was neither an explicit source of inspiration nor invoked for the Cherry River project, the futures of Enwezor are palpable in this anticolonial project restoring the past to reimagine the present.
摘要:2018年8月，多媒体展览《樱桃河，河流交汇的地方》在蒙大拿州三福克斯的密苏里水源州立公园向观众展出。早在欧洲人越过大西洋入侵之前，密苏里河的源头，或三条支流的汇合处，是北部平原印第安人的十字路口。这个基于地点的项目名为Cherry River，由艺术家Mary Ellen Strom和美国原住民研究员Shane Doyle共同创作，由蒙大拿西南部的一个艺术文化合作组织Mountain Time Arts制作。为了分析这个遗址，“山地时光艺术”召集了形形色色的参与者。他们的研究问题变成了，怎样才能改变一条河的名字?经过六个月的研究，这个项目集中在将东加拉廷河的名字改回土著乌鸦的名字樱桃河上。樱桃河这个名字是为了纪念和描述生长在河岸上的无数的樱桃树，这些树为野生动物提供了食物，也尊重了土著历史、流水生态和西北地区的河岸系统。北美对土著人民权利的关注与Okwui Enwezor在世界各地的许多开创性举措相一致。这种图像、诗歌和第一人称叙事的组合是一种实践的例子，它与恩韦佐的非殖民化行动的遗产进行了对话，并在几个开创性的展览中创新地使用策展策略，以面对“深刻的历史变化和全球转型时期当代艺术的复杂困境”。虽然Enwezor既不是樱桃河项目的灵感来源，也不是樱桃河项目的灵感来源，但在这个反殖民项目中，Enwezor的未来是显而易见的，它恢复了过去，重新想象了现在。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/10757163-8971271
Monique Kerman
When Okwui Enwezor gained world renown as artistic director of Documenta11 in 2002, his accomplishments as curator of contemporary African art were already well established. His In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, exhibition (1996) had the temerity to describe the intentional ways in which Africans shaped their own photographic representation in a medium whose history was as long and distinguished in Africa as in Europe. Enwezor’s 2001 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a revelatory journey through the long process of colonial resistance and independence no less revolutionary for its astonishing range of content far beyond that of art objects, including film, music, theater, literature, and literature. In helming Documenta11, Enwezor not only included a historic number of non-white, non-European artists but also redefined the exhibition, before its opening in Kassel, by conceiving it as a final installment of several “platforms” staged worldwide. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions engineered to globalize the art world, and they effectively amounted to acts of art-historical decolonization. Enwezor’s legacy is instructive. Achieving an inclusive and equitable art history that is sustainable requires decentralizing white, Eurocentric, male, cisgender, and heterosexual hegemony. In two of his final projects, large-scale solo shows of Frank Bowling and El Anatsui, exhibiting these artists on their own terms did just that. It is through his curatorial practice of art-world decolonization that Enwezor has issued a rallying cry. He has shown us the way forward.
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