Zeke Turner reports on the pioneering work of Okwui Enwezor in the WSJ:
Next year, the Nigerian-born curator and writer will become the first African director of the Venice Biennale, where he'll continue his career-long project of challenging the status quo
More here
Juergen Teller for WSJ. Magazine
...Enwezor's curatorial project has been global since the beginning, pushing African and diaspora artists to the foreground. And between the Douglas show, the museum's retrospective of works by the mixed-media artist Ellen Gallagher earlier this year and a 2013 show of the photographer Lorna Simpson's work, the Haus der Kunst will have already presented nearly as many major solo shows of black artists as the Museum of Modern Art in New York has in the past 20 years.
Since his 1996 breakthrough as a curator of In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to Present, an exhibit of 30 African photographers at the Guggenheim Museum, Enwezor has alternated between ambitious international exhibitions that seek to define their moment—biennials in Johannesburg, Gwangju and beyond, along with the Paris Triennale in 2012—and historically driven, encyclopedic museum shows centered on topics such as African liberation movements in the 20th century, the arc of apartheid and the use of archive material in contemporary art. Enwezor is the first curator of his generation and the second ever to command two of Europe's most precious cultural territories—Documenta, the five-yearly exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and now the Venice Biennale—and the first African to direct either one.
With the call to the airline concluded, Enwezor returns to the breakfast table, where the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye and Zoë Ryan, a curator from the Art Institute of Chicago, are waiting. Two well-worn books—Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and Peter Rowe's Civic Realism—rest on the table. The books, the curator and the architect are part of a working breakfast to plan a forthcoming exhibition of Adjaye's work that will travel between Ryan's museum in Chicago and Munich. Adjaye describes Enwezor as his "intellectual barometer." He is also helping him design the structure and appearance of his exhibition in Venice, a sprawling, citywide canvas that each Biennale's artistic director must confront and manipulate, loosely conducting the chorus of voices emerging from the national pavilions and anchoring it all with certain areas the director curates himself.
Enwezor's plans are still forming, but given his track record, his approach is sure to change the usual terms of Europe's oldest contemporary art exhibition. In announcing his appointment of Enwezor, Biennale president Paolo Baratta cited the curator's interest in "the complex phenomenon of globalization in relation to local roots."
