Selected Writings, Volume 2

Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was an internationally recognized and pathbreaking art curator, former director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and coauthor of numerous books and exhibition catalogs.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.

“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 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

• List of Illustrations  ixAcknowledgments  xvIntroduction: Magnificent Scale / Terry Smith  11. The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2006)  192. Place-Making or in the “Wrong Place”: Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Condition (2008)  263. Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument (2008)  504. The Subversion of Realism: Likeness, Resemblance, and Invented Lives in Lynette Yaidom-Boakye’s Postportrait Paintings (2010)  1035. Text, Subtext, Intertext: Painting, Language, and Signifying in the Work of Glenn Ligon (2011)  1256. Intense Proximity: Concerning the Disappearance of Distance (2012)  1507. From Screen to Space: Projection and Reanimation in the Early Work of Steve McQueen (2012)  1828. Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2013)  2059. On the Aesthetic and Political Language of Art: A Conversation between Kendell Geers and William Kentridge (2013)  24610. The State of Things (2015)  27111. World Platforms, Exhibiting Adjacency, and the Surplus Value of Art (2015)  28512. The Judgment of Art: Postwar and Artistic Worldliness (2016)  30913. Mappa Mundi: Frank Bowling’s Cognitive Abstraction (2017)  34714. El Gran EspectÁculo: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Modernity, Modernism (2018)  40515. The Wreck of Utopia: Alienation and Disalienation in John Akomfrah’s Postcolonial Cinema (2018)  43616. Landings: Okwui Enwezor in Conversation with Massimiliano Gioni (2019)  45617. Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2020)  473Bibliography: Published Writings of Okwui Enwezor / Compiled by llhan Ozan  477Index  499