What does it truly mean to be a world-builder? This term is commonly used to describe artists, particularly those with innovative visual and conceptual vocabularies who create fictional alternatives to our existing reality. However, this concept can be applied in an entirely different sense to Okwui Enwezor, who stands among the most significant architects of today's art world as we understand it.
Enwezor was a poet, writer, curator, theorist, educator, and museum director who pioneered new ways of seeing and experiencing our contemporary times. Born in Calabar, Nigeria, in 1963, his dynamic and influential life was tragically cut short in 2019 due to illness. Now, the most recent contribution to his extensive legacy—a remarkable two-volume collection of his writings spanning just over a thousand pages—allows readers to trace the evolution of his ideas throughout his lifetime and follow a pivotal period in art history, from the turn of the 20th century to the early 21st century, when Enwezor served as a major force for change.
Throughout these comprehensive pages, which include catalog essays, exhibition reviews, and in-depth analyses of individual artists' work, Enwezor's expansive arguments frequently crystallize into focused statements of purpose. "My key interest has been rooted in the examination of artistic differencing through a form of curatorial counterinsurgency," he wrote in 2007. "I have been examining contemporary African art through exhibitions, as specifically decisive places in which the idea of the contemporary can be constituted, and, as such, a place for the creation of its meaning in relation to an enlarged global public sphere."
This public sphere he described was grounded in experiences that curator Hoor Al-Qasimi characterizes as existing "beyond the purview of Western colonial epistemologies." It embraced subject positions marked not by rigid categorization but by the fluidity and hybridity of a globalizing world in constant motion—one negotiating postcoloniality alongside the acceleration of capitalism and neoliberalism.
The dominant art world that Enwezor confronted at the beginning of this chronologically arranged collection, which spans from 1994 to 2019, had a markedly different structure and critical consensus than what exists today. That art world often assumed that art history was centered in the West and consistently disregarded global histories of colonialism and racism. The first essay in the volume is positioned passionately against what he called "the epistemological bias of the West and its systemic obscuring of facts that run against the story of Western Influence." This was written long before widespread demands to decolonize museum programs became commonplace.
In the mid-1990s, the international contemporary art world was also significantly smaller, with far fewer biennials and art fairs. Most modern and contemporary art histories were taught within a narrow Western lens, despite decades of Black radicalism, cultural studies, anti-colonial theory, and real-world liberation movements. This context demonstrates the magnitude of what Enwezor was working against.
His lasting legacy would be to decenter the Western canon and open art to divergent perspectives and experiences. He exemplified this approach early in his career when he was selected to curate the 2002 Documenta 11, the legendary quinquennial exhibition established in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Instead of focusing solely on the exhibition in its traditional home city of Kassel, as had been the practice for more than half a century, he completely remapped the entire project into what he called "five platforms." The exhibition unfolded through a series of intensive lectures and conferences across four locations around the world: Vienna and Berlin, New Delhi, the West Indies, and Lagos, all leading up to a final presentation in Kassel.
Enwezor wanted to frame the exhibition as a "diagnostic toolbox [that] actively seeks to stage the relationships, conjunctions, and disjunctions between different realities: between artists, institutions, disciplines, genres, generations, processes, forms, media, activities; between identity and subjectification."
Documenta 11 was initially criticized by the press for its ambitious scope and scrutinized for its identity 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," and lamented that "for art world insiders, the first challenge was how to pronounce [Enwezor's] name correctly."
Today, his name is well-known, as are those of the many artists, curators, writers, and scholars whom he supported and collaborated with on this exhibition and throughout his career. These include Renée Green, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Doris Salcedo, and Raqs Media Collective, among many other artists who participated in Documenta 11 and went on to shape 21st-century art.
In the collection's first essay, an impassioned editorial from the 1994 inaugural issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art—which he founded with Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, and Chika Okeke-Agulu—Enwezor wrote: "One of the problematic aspects of visiting museums, art galleries, and other sites of cultural valuation, in Europe and in the United States, is the pervasive absence in these highly policed environments, of art by contemporary African artists." He continued: "Not only are the works of these artists conspicuously absent from the museum and gallery environment, they've also been accorded little attention of significance in academic art historical practices, university curriculums, the print media, or other organs of such reportage."
Taking direct aim at an art establishment resistant to substantive change, he argued against then-current dichotomies such as First/Third World, Center/Periphery, Black/White, and High/Low, stating that "there are 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."
Enwezor's own thinking was fundamentally opposed to such restrictive categorizations. He advocated for large-scale exhibitions and embodied what art historian Kobena Mercer described as "a kind of critical cosmopolitanism." One of the many concepts that evolves throughout the book is his belief that contemporary art unfolds within complex geopolitical arrangements, and that "the restless, unfixed boundaries, multiplicities, and the state of permanent transition within which [contemporary art] is practiced and communicated" make it resistant to a single, unified view of art and global totalization.
Though most art would ultimately be displayed in blank white cubes, Enwezor consistently reminded viewers that it originated in specific contexts and sets of conditions. His legacy did much to make the art world more truly global, yet it accomplished this not by proposing a new grand narrative, but rather by dismantling totalizing narratives altogether.
This approach to breaking down rigid frameworks can be seen in his most influential exhibitions, which have become models in the field of curatorial studies and are thoroughly documented in this book. Consider "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994," which opened in 2001 at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich. The exhibition provided what he called "a critical biography of Africa" by focusing on the continent's decolonization process that "required defense and legitimation of all and every sphere of African thought and life." Modernism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and other political and cultural movements were presented through visual art, sound, music, theater, posters, and more.
The exhibition embedded art within larger, sometimes opposing currents of history, politics, and culture, establishing a hallmark of his curatorial method—one that created new pathways for exhibition-making and for a contemporary art that remained connected to its context.
Many of Enwezor's projects highlighted cultural documents, particularly photography, for its dual capacity to both open up social possibilities and to mislead or obscure reality. This focus is evident in two exhibitions he organized while serving as adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. The first, "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art" (2008), took its title from Jacques Derrida's book of the same name and explored how artists use archives as source materials. The second, "Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life" (2012), included nearly five hundred photographs, as well as films, literature, and magazines that chronicled the history of apartheid in South Africa and the growing movement to dismantle it.
In the essay accompanying "Rise and Fall," Enwezor provided a precise analysis of how photographic culture—including both photojournalists and artists—fueled anti-apartheid protests. In one passage, he wrote about how Margaret Bourke-White, a Life magazine contributor, captured "a political and pictorial transition in the nascent anti-apartheid movement" in her 1948 photograph of a white man standing by a large ornamental platform outside the Johannesburg City Hall on which the defiant words "God is Black" had been chalked, with "the comment appearing to upend the power dynamics embedded in the public space."
While Enwezor is widely recognized for his groundbreaking biennials—Johannesburg (1993) and Venice (2015), and especially his transformative Documenta 11 (2002)—these focused thematic exhibitions also clearly demonstrate how he answered his own challenge to curators: to work both within canonical thinking and against the grain of that thinking.
The numerous pieces in the two volumes also trace how Enwezor expanded the art canon alongside larger trends of the era, particularly the globalization of the art world and the evolution of biennials, which are essential to understanding today's art landscape. Enwezor's own perspective evolved from a more hopeful, optimistic view of a connecting world in the 1990s to one that clearly analyzed the crises of the new neoliberal era and what he called "the partly technological problem of intense proximity" that contributed to the rising authoritarianism and growing nihilism of the 2010s.
It is both moving and frustrating to read these essays while wishing this sharp, contrarian mind were still with us, still building worlds, as we navigate into a new post-global, post-liberal era. However, the collection demonstrates that his legacy remains "an open work in progress, across multilayered platforms, for the many worlds to come, all of them postcolonial," as Terry Smith, Enwezor's close collaborator and editor of these collected writings, notes in his introduction to the second volume.
These books illuminate the many tools and methods Enwezor developed throughout his career, encouraging us to see the contemporary not as a break from the past but as a complex convergence of past histories, established patterns, and new possibilities that surround and inform art. His work continues to influence how we understand and engage with contemporary art in our increasingly connected yet fragmented world.
