Okwui Enwezor: the Nigerian who confronted the European art canon

“The way I see it, it is like night and day. The 80s and before was the colonial, Jim Crow, and apartheid days put together,”.
“It was completely acceptable to the curators of the period that contemporary art did not happen in places like Africa, Asia, South America or the Middle East … globalisation transformed the myopia that previously ruled.”

                                             - Okwui Enwezor said in 2005


By Oliver Basciano

Okwui Enwezor, who has died aged 55, was a peerless, charismatic Nigerian curator who helped place non-western art histories on an equal footing with the long-established narrative of European and North American art. Part of a generation of auteur curators who rose to prominence in the 1990s, he, more than any other, was one with a mission.

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Enwezor refused to be defined by his two landmark exhibitions. For him just as important was his direction of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1996 and the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2008, as well as Meeting Points 6, an exhibition which took place over 12 months from April 2011 in eight cities across Europe, the Middle East and north Africa, including Damascus, Tangier and Berlin. …