Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings Volume 1 & 2

Before his premature death in 2019, the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor committed himself to what would be —in one sense—his final international exhibition, the fifteenth instalment of the Sharjah Biennial. In a declarative email to the Sharjah Art Foundation president and director Hoor al Qasimi, Enwezor was economical. His thinking, he said, was that the biennial should work with the proposition ‘thinking historically in the present’, and that Sharjah offered ‘a horizon of possibility’ and a ‘heretical space’ for curatorial and artistic interpretation of the theme. The theatrical flourish of this curatorial statement is qualified however by the next unequivocal line, as if he were taking al Qasimi to task: ‘I’m not interested in doing just another middling contemporary art exhibition that just disappears. I want to engage your entire institution’