Suchergebnisse

When Okwui Enwezor gained world renown as artistic director of Documenta11 in 2002, his accomplishments as curator of contemporary African art were already well established. His In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940–Present, exhibition (1996) had the temerity to describe the intentional ways in which Africans shaped their own photographic representation in a medium whose history was as long and distinguished in Africa as in Europe. Enwezor's 2001 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a revelatory journey through the long process of colonial resistance and independence no less revolutionary for its astonishing range of content far beyond that of art objects, including film, music, theater, literature, and literature. In helming Documenta11, Enwezor not only included a historic number of non-white, non-European artists but also redefined the exhibition, before its opening in Kassel, by conceiving it as a final installment of several "platforms" staged worldwide. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions engineered to globalize the art world, and they effectively amounted to acts of art-historical decolonization. Enwezor's legacy is instructive. Achieving an inclusive and equitable art history that is sustainable requires decentralizing white, Eurocentric, male, cisgender, and heterosexual hegemony. In two of his final projects, large-scale solo shows of Frank Bowling and El Anatsui, exhibiting these artists on their own terms did just that. It is through his curatorial practice of art-world decolonization that Enwezor has issued a rallying cry. He has shown us the way forward.

Propelled by the sometimes opportunistic, sometimes desperate desire for better living conditions, migrants leave one land to occupy another. This act is inherently transgressive; whether this transgression is justified as "progress" or used as fodder for persecution depends on who controls the historical narrative. In recent work, artists Zineb Sedira, Allan deSouza, and Mary Evans express both the instability of the migrant as a cipher and the anxieties that the migratory experience creates. The current global refugee crisis has fanned the flames of xenophobia and virulent nationalism in Europe and the United States, and these works offer a rebuttal to degrading rhetoric and imagery that stigmatizes the migrant. Sedira's 2008 photographs and 2009 videos of a Mauritanian ship graveyard evoke desperate emigration as well as economic stagnation and environmental degradation. DeSouza's World Series (2011), inspired by Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1941), suggests bodily movement within a matrix of geopolitical, state-controlled, and natural environments, while referencing historical precedents such as Columbus. Evans's series Please Do Not Bend (2015–16) is a touching tribute to the resilience of Africans and their descendants who have migrated, voluntarily or by force, over the centuries. In Evans's Thousands Are Sailing (2016), anonymous silhouettes of brown bodies are in a liminal space, unmoored from one nation and locked out of another. Migration is an unstable experience, and an equally unstable subject. These works reclaim the imagery associated with the "abject immigrant" to restore their agency as well as their humanity.

Artist Mary Evans has been working in cut paper since the mid-1990s. In her chosen medium, Evans investigates signs and signifiers of the way humans tend to classify certain races and nationalities, particularly in visual terms. Over the course of her career, her work has evolved to reveal the ways in which racism, the history of slavery, and the legacy of the British Empire are embedded in such practices. For over twenty years, Evans has been exploring recurring motifs that resonate not only with her personal biography as a Lagos-born, London-based artist, but also with contemporary identity politics and issues of belonging and alienation. An analysis of Evans's recent work, including Willow Plate series (2013), Gingerbread (2012), and Held (2012), explicates the ways in which cultural and national ideologies are articulated through an exploration of personal and historical narratives of human experience. Evans's silhouetted figures evoke racial and sexual stereotypes and thus powerfully communicate humanity's historical tendency to categorize and prejudge. An investigation of how her early training, experiences abroad, and artist residencies specifically impacted her professional development contextualizes the works. In addition, a comparison of Evans's work with the well-known oeuvre of Kara Walker highlights striking thematic differences despite intriguing similarities in both form and subject and demonstrates each artist's unique talents in the medium of cut paper installation.