Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor ( born October 23, 1963 in Calabar, Nigeria ) is a curator and writer. His native language is Igbo. Since October 2011 he has been director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Enwezor began in 1983 after his move to New York to study political science at New Jersey City State College. At this time he began to take an interest in art and sat down consistently to ensure that the international art world overcomes his obsession with the Euro-American context. Enwezor flanked this with publications and founded in 1994, published three times yearly magazine " NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art ," which he publishes to this day along with Salah Hassan ( Cornell University) and Chika Okeke - Agulu ( Princeton University).

Since October 2011, Enwezor is Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Previously, he was an associate curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. He was Dean of Students at the San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2009) and Visiting Professor at the Art History University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, New York, the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, and the University of Umea in Sweden. Enwezor is Joanne Cassulo Fellow of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2010-2011).

Enwezor was Artistic Director of numerous large-scale exhibitions. 1996-97 he led the second Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa, from 1998 to 2002 he was artistic director of documenta 11 in Kassel, in 2006 he curated the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville, as well as 2007-2008, the 7th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. He is currently Artistic Director of Meeting Points 6, a project for performance and visual art in eight cities (Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, Tangier, Brussels and Berlin) and chief curator of La Triennale, Paris, 2012. 2011 he has curatorial advisor to the " Dublin Contemporary" in Ireland. On December 4, 2013 Enwezor has been appointed Artistic Director of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Curated Exhibitions (selection)

  • Snap Judgments: New Positions in African Photography (International Center of Photography, New York)
  • Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (International Center of Photography, New York)
  • The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 ( Museum Villa Stuck, Munich )
  • Mirror's Edge ( Bildmuseet Umeå, Umeå, Sweden)
  • In / Sight: African Photographers, 1940 -Present ( Guggenheim Museum, New York)
  • Global Conceptualism ( Queens Museum, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis )
  • Stan Douglas: Le Detroit ( Art Institute of Chicago)
  • David Goldblatt: Fifty One Years ( Museu of Contemporary Art of Barcelona )

Publications as Author

  • Events of the Self: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection ( Steidl, 2010)
  • Contemporary African Art Since 1980 ( with Chika Okeke - Agulu; Damiani Editore, 2009)
  • Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art ( ICP / Steidl, 2008)
  • Major exhibitions and the antinomies of a transnational global form ( Fink Verlag, 2002 )

Publisher anthologies

  • Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Contemporaneity Old Criolla ( with Terry Smith and Nancy Condee, Duke University Press, 2008 )
  • Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace ( with Olu Oguibe; Iniva and MIT Press, 1999 )
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