Selected Writings, Volume 1

Toward a New African Art Discourse

Okwui Enwezor, Terry Smith

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781478031529, 9781478028314
• eBook ISBN: 9781478060536
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

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). In addition to breaking ground as a curator, Enwezor was also a prolific critic, essayist, and theorist. Selected Writings—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Enwezor's most influential and foundational works. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor's writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world. Volume 1, Toward a New African Art Discourse, includes fifteen essays written between 1994 and 2006. 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 first main ambition that drove his career: to found and sustain what he called a "New African Art Discourse." Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor's status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword / Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation
• Advisory Editors’ Preface / Salah M. Hassan and Chika Okeke-Agulu
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Okwui Enwezor’s Diasporic Imagination / Terry Smith
• 1. Redrawing the Boundaries: Toward a New African Art Discourse (1994)
• 2. The Ruined City: Desolation, Rapture, and Georges Adéagbo (1996)
• 3. The Body in Question: Whose Body? Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1995)
• 4. Ellen Gallagher (1996)
• 5. Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Disruption: History, Culture, and Representation in the Works of African Photographers (1996) / Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya
• 6. Travel Notes: Living, Working, and Traveling in a Restless World (1997)
• 7. A Question of Place: Revisions, Reassessments, Diaspora (1997)
• 8. Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on “African” Conceptualism (1999)
• 9. Between Worlds: Postmodernism and African Artists in the Western Metropolis (1995-96)
• 10. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001)
• 11. The Black Box (2002)
• 12. The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition (2003)
• 13. Mega-exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (2003–4)
• 14. Repetition and Differentiation: Lorna Simpson’s Iconography of the Racial Sublime (2006)
• 15. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006)
• Bibliography: Published Writings of Okwui Enwezor Compiled by Ilhan Ozan
• Index