Okwui Enwezor's Prehistory of the Present: A Conversation

Abstract Shortly before his untimely death in 2019, aged 55, curator Okwui Enwezor asked art historian and critical theorist Terry Smith, a longtime friend and close collaborator, to collect a representative sample of his published writings, then scattered in catalogues, journals, magazines, and online. In this conversation, curator Naomi Beckwith and art historians Huey Copeland and Pamela M. Lee talk with Smith about his editorship of the resultant two volumes of texts by Enwezor, published in 2025 by Duke University Press and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Together, they reflect on the nature of Enwezor's achievement as a post-colonial, “world-picturing” thinker who was hyper alert to the operations of “history in the present.” They explore his curatorial strategies in key exhibitions and assess the current relevance of his practice. Volume 1 of Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings: Towards a New African Art Discourse begins with his programmatic editorial for the first issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which he, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and Salah Hassan, co-founded in New York in 1994. The volume includes essays from landmark exhibitions including In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996), the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography (1997), The Short Century: Independence Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (2001), and Documenta11 (2002), as well as essays on individual artists such as Georges Adéagbo, Ellen Gallagher, and Lorna Simpson. Texts such as “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition” (2003) embody his efforts to develop a discursive framework for artists from Africa and its widespread diaspora, and to demonstrate the impact of their art on the wider world. The second volume, Curating the Postcolonial Condition, collects essays from exhibitions such as his 2006 Seville Biennial The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society through Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument (2008), All The World's Futures at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–65 (2016) to the posthumous Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2002). Critical essays on, and interviews with, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Kendell Geers, William Kentridge, Frank Bowling, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Akomfrah, and Nari Ward exemplify his commitment to the pivotal role of individual artists such as these.