It was him. He’d entered from a side door close to where I stood at the back of the darkened Arena of the Central pavilion. Brawny, average height, bespoke suited with a rakish bandana for a necktie, he stood alone. Nobody had recognised him. Not yet. All eyes in the packed starchitect David Adjaye’s superbly remodeled red Arena were fixed on two performers on stage, a man and a woman. The man was reading from Marx’s Das Kapital and the woman, lissome, danced sinuously to the words. Cool.

I sidled up to “the man” and deployed my Stanley-meets-Livingstone gambit: “Mr Enwezor, I presume?” A smile lit up his broad face as he offered me his hand, in a firm grip. “How are you?” he said. “Just great, Mr Enwezor. I get to meet you at last. Can I take a picture of you?” I asked. “Sure, go ahead.” I barely had time for a single shot when the lights came back on at the end of the performance and a scrum formed around — Okwui, Okwui, Okwui! Everyone wanted a piece of him. No way was I going to get my impromptu interview now. I edged away, to go find Wangechi Mutu, next on my list of the movers and shakers I needed to buttonhole. Somewhere in the Giardini maze the Kenyan-born enchantress had a fabulous installation.


Biennale President Baratta and Curator Enwezor


The Smile of Early Success

Yes, the art world has a new superstar, the consequential Okwui Enwezor, 51, the first non-Western appointed curator of the oldest, coveted, humongous contemporary art happening: the Venice Biennale. Enwezor’s day job remains head of Munich’s Haus der Kunst (House of Art), in the fourth of a five-year contract. Haus der Kunst? Correct. Who would have thought it will come to pass that a black man will be called upon to breathe new life into a historic institution at the very heart of the German volk? The cornerstone of the colonnaded neo-classical building on the southern edge of the English Garden, Munich’s largest park, was laid by a chancellor named Adolf Hitler. Oh, the zeitgeist!

Success smiled early at “Okwui” — as everyone calls him and he responds to. He’d dreamt and prepared for success from the day, at 18, he left the comforts of his affluent family home in Enugu and boarded a Pan Am flight out of Africa and into the Brave New World via New York. Later, with a political science degree from New Jersey State University in his pocket, poetry, art, literature, history and the Black experience, that had hitherto been keen pastimes, turned into an all-consuming passion. In 1994, he co-founded Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art as a platform to address what he saw as the “cultural mis-education” in America about his beloved continent.

In 1996, at 33, and with zilch experience in curation he was headhunted by Spanish curator Octavio Zaya, who had come across Nka, to join a team comprising himself and two other whites commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to exhibit the work of African photographers: In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to Present. Probing essays that Zaya, Enwezor and Olu Oguibe wrote to accompany the photos helped educate perceptions about Africa in the early post-colonial years when so little was written down and explained on art in Africa; its identity, the nature and use of images in African traditions. The Guggenheim show helped put African photographers such as Samuel Fosso, Malick Sidibe, Santu Mafokeng and David Goldblatt on the world map.



Documenta 11

In 1998 Enwezor was selected to prepare for the 2002 Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany. He was again the first non-Western to fill the artistic-director’s slot. Working with a team of five curators Enwezor created a truly international event, firstly, by giving room to countries that had never been represented at Documenta. Meaning, the Third World got a foot into Kassel for the first time. Secondly, he innovated with the idea of “platforms,” events held in five locations around the world, with Kassel as the fifth and highpoint. The platforms introduced a much-needed gravitas via intellectual discussions on the significance of many of the artworks on display, especially the non European art.

No surprise Enwezor’s Documenta set a record — 650,000 visitors came to enjoy 450 artworks showcased in five locations around Kassel. Obviously, the Enwezor touch was the kind of magic the European public had found wanting in their contemporary art. Enwezor challenged and excited the public to critical acclaim. Take the fantabulous Nigerian-British Yinka Shonibare, a rising star at the time, Shonibare’s virtuoso installations, of headless 17th century European aristocrats dressed in wax prints of African motifs and caught in compromising positions, became a huge hit.



The Consequential Enwezor

After Documenta 11, biennials and triennales in Johannesburg, Gwangju Mexico City, Paris, etc, followed in quick succession. The 56th Venice Biennale is the capstone of the rise and rise of Enwezor. Hardly a month passes by without him being requested to catch a plane to yet another event, to chair a panel discussion, to give another talk or to act consultant curator at one end of the world to another.

Supremely self-confident, when Enwezor spots talent, even those more talented than he is, he draws them into his orbit. He’s a man of ideas, and he’s driven — perhaps his two strongest points. He might have started out with a pioneering zeal to ensure Africans and Blacks in Diaspora get to sit at the big table too at a time when we were confined to the kitchen cooking the meals or serving the coffee. Enwezor has tapped into the energies and talents of Shonibare, David Adjaye, John Akomfrah, Sonia Boyce, Theaster Gates, Kay Hassan, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Simon Njami and Wangechi Mutu not because they are Black, but that they excel in what they do.

Today, Enwezor’s big tent is a vast rainbow network of creative people across the planet. He’s collaborated with Saâdane Afif’, Terry Adkins, Mounira Al Solh’, Jennifer Allora, Mathew Barney, Georg Baselitz, Jonathan Bepler, Ricardo Brey, Teresa Burga, Guillermo Calzadilla, Melvin Edwards, Inji Efflatoun, Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Tetsuya Ishida, Alexander Kluge, Chris Marker, Fabio Mauri, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Adrian Piper, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Robert Smithson — the list is long.



Rising Star versus Falling Star

The adulation Enwezor enjoys among his peers is genuine, merited. However, we live in a world where his kind of success begets detractors. Robert Storr, Dean of Yale’s School of Art, typifies this syndrome. The animus between Storr and Enwezor is longstanding. Somewhere on You Tube there’s a spat between the two at a public lecture in Sydney in 2008, a year after Storr had curated the 52nd Venice Biennale. The pathos, falling star versus rising star, as revealed in Sydney is excruciation.

What eats the cake is a Q&A interview Storr gave in the Italian Artribune (Numero 25, 2015) on the eve of Enwezor’s greatest triumph, the 56th Biennale. Asked what he thought of Enwezor’s theme All The World’s Futures and the inclusion of Marx’s Das Kapital as a theoretical reference to some of the challenges of the day, Storr responded with a diatribe. He called Enwezor a demagogue, a corporate raider, a self promoter, a bully, and what have you. No, he (Storr) isn’t interested in anything the “go-for” jet-setting curator has to say about any topic. What surprised him most was how Enwezor got selected to curate the Venice biennale in the first place — when there were “more interesting and more principled curators.” He cited names of Olu Oguibe and Bisi Silva as worthier Africans for such a job. Wow!

Oguibe, Director of African Studies at the University of Connecticut, and Silva, founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, are Nigerians, like Enwezor, and the three have professional relations spanning decades. Are we looking at the old colonialist stratagem here — to divide and conquer? Oguibe and Silva are too sophisticated and too comfortable in their skin to fall for this sort of thing.



Indisputable Heft

What’s one to make of all this? There’s an unspoken decorum in the art world. You may critique the art, never the person of the creator. I sense here, someone with deep unresolved issues, a simmering animus against a younger competitor’s heft pasted onto the older person’s own creeping sell-by date. It must have rankled the Yale don and one time curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, that three years after his “rumble” with Enwezor in Sydney, the influential ArtReview ranked Enwezor 24th on its annual list of 100 most powerful people of the art world. I must have missed it but I didn’t see Storr’s name on the list. And, in 2014, The Wall Street Journal, ran a headline: “How Okwui Enwezor Changed the Art World.” Ouch! Ouch!

For me, when a David Adjaye describes Enwezor as his “intellectual barometer,” what more can mere mortals add? The heft of Enwezor in the art world is indisputable. His legacy will endure. The real question today is, where does the scrawny Igbo kid, who in 1982 boarded a Pan Am flight from Lagos to chase a shooting star across the Atlantic, go from Venice?



- See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/scrawny-igbo-kid-who-changed-art-world#sthash.EdLinzT7.dpuf

ok