SELECTED WRITINGS, Volume 2: Curating the Postcolonial Condition, edited by Terry Smith
528pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2025
ISBN: 9781478031567
This volume, the second of a two-volume set of the most influential and foundational writings of pathbreaking curator, critic, essayist, and theorist Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), includes seventeen essays written between 2006 and 2019. Selected Writings, Volume 1: Towards a New African Discourse is also available.
Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the second main ambition that drove his career: enabling a critical, diasporic imagining of postcoloniality that would become pervasive within global art discourse.
“Okwui Enwezor was one of a kind in every respect. In a mere twenty-five years, he single-handedly transformed the culture of contemporary art by fully integrating African and African diaspora artists into a global understanding of modern and contemporary practice. His hugely influential writings were vital to his overall project of recasting the entire discourse on twentieth- and twenty-first-century African and Afro-diaspora art. This volume’s depth and range of selections represents the sheer comprehensiveness of Enwezor’s achievement and will extend his work’s ongoing impact.” Kobena Mercer, author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s
“Okwui Enwezor has been among the most stimulating and politically engaged curators in the last hundred years. He always had a finger on the pulse of practicing artists and critical theory, as evidenced in these writings. This informed his majestic curatorial approach for making the most important, groundbreaking exhibitions in the twenty-first century, from Documenta to Venice to Sharjah. These essays constitute one of the most important documents and legacies for understanding contemporary art and curatorial practice today.” Isaac Julien
Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). He was Director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and co-author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including Rise and Fall of Apartheid, photography and the bureaucracy of everyday life (with Rory Bester) and El Anatsui, the reinvention of sculpture (with Chika Okeke-Agulu).
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor at Large, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah.