A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor

Abstract

AbstractThis interview took place on September 8, 2001, in a public forum at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was sponsored by the Department of Museum Education in conjunction with the exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, which was curated by Okwui Enwezor for the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich and presented at the MCA for its U.S. premiere by the curator Francesco Bonami from September 8 to December 30, 2001.1 Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarol BeckerCarol Becker is Dean of Faculty and a professor of liberal arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (State University of New York Press, 1996) and Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002)Okwui EnwezorOkwui Enwezor is a historian and scholar from Nigeria. He curated The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movement in Africa 1945–1994 and Trade Routes: History and Geography, the Second Johannesburg Biennial (1997). Enwezor is Artistic Director of Documenta II which opens in Kassel, Germany, in June 2002; he is the first non-European curator of a Documenta show. His publications as coeditor with Olu Oguibe include Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (inIVA and MIT Press, 1999).