Legendary Curator Okwui Enwezor’s Final Show, ‘Postcolonial,’ Will Now Become a Reality in Sharjah

It turns out that Okwui
Enwezor—the legendary curator who died from cancer complications
earlier this year at age 55—has yet to open his final
show. 

Today, the Sharjah Art
Foundation in the United Arab Emirates announced that the next
edition of its biennial—the leading contemporary art exhibition in
the Middle East—will include a project that Enwezor began
organizing before his death. Titled “Postcolonial,” the show is
billed as a sequel to his sprawling, widely influential 2017
exhibition “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic,
1945–1965” at Haus der Kunst in Munich. The new exhibition is set
to open as a centerpiece of the 15th edition of the biennial (known
as SB15) this March.

Shortly after his departure from
the Haus der
Kunst, where he served
as artistic director from 2011 to 2018, Enwezor was approached by
collector Hoor al-Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah
Art Foundation, about curating the next edition of the biennial.
The two worked closely on the program until the curator’s death in
March 2019, and he left behind copious notes and preparatory
materials. 

“It is difficult to overstate
the tremendous impact Okwui Enwezor had on contemporary art and its
institutions,” al-Qasimi, who cites the curator’s 2002 edition of
documenta as a major influence for her own globally minded
perspective on art, said in a statement. “Our hope is that SB15 will serve as a
platform to further explore and expand on his curatorial and
intellectual legacy.”

Prior to his death, Enwezor
asked al-Qasimi to oversee the execution of his curatorial vision
with a group of his closest collaborators: curator Tarek Abou El
Fetouh; director of NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, Ute
Meta Bauer; and art historians Salah M. Hassan and Chika
Okeke-Agulu. al-Qasimi will also work with an advisory committee
composed of architect Sir David Adjaye, artist John Akomfrah, and
Ashkal Alwan art center director Christine Tohmé.

The list of artists and
exhibitions under the SB15 umbrella has yet to be announced,
though, like previous editions, the biennial will feature a series
of major commissions, large-scale public installations,
performances, and films in addition to Enwezor’s historical show,
according to the announcement.

Enwezor was also responsible for
developing the biennial’s overall theme: “Thinking Historically in
the Present.” In his notes, he envisioned the exhibition as a
“module with which to deal with the disruptive power of artistic
monolingualism but also as horizon of the possible to conceive
another theoretical space for ‘Thinking Historically in the
Present.’”

For Qasimi, the concept is
representative of the kind of big-picture thinking that endeared
Enwezor to a generation of curators, scholars, and
artists.

“You can’t really look at the
future without looking at the past and the present,” Qasimi told
the New York
Times. “Everybody’s
looking back at art history, trying to rewrite the narrative of
what we’ve been told. I think that’s why a lot of people have been
inspired by ‘Postwar,’ and I hope that the second part,
‘Postcolonial,’ will also do that.”

Earlier this year, the Sharjah
Foundation announced that Enwezor bequeathed his papers and library
to its new Africa Institute, which is set to be designed by Adjaye
and unveiled in 2023. 

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‘Postcolonial,’ Will Now Become a Reality in Sharjah appeared
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