Shifting the Frame: Okwui Enwezor's curatorial impact

The Short Century. Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, opened in 2001 at Vila Stuck in Munich. This exhibition represents an early example of Okwui Enwezor’s insurmountable impact and lasting contributions to the curatorial and art-historical field, since it opened the field of African Contemporary Art and was conceived from a global perspective. As a Black German scholar, I am particularly interested in how Enwezor navigated curating with a decolonial approach in the conservative state of Munich inside a German institution, in a country that circumvents its colonial histories. The groundbreaking exhibition The Short Century, was first anticipated to become a “book about decolonialization as one of the principle events of the twentieth century” holds some of his core notions, the archival, the performative, the political and the global. This paper will trace Enwezor’s understanding of decoloniality and African Modernities in order to emphasize how he opened up through the multiple tools of curation and scholarship a new perspective on African Contemporary Art, which breaks out of the dialectical and embraces Fanon’s New Humanism. By following this exhibition from its opening in Munich to the remountings at the MCA (2001) and MoMA (2002) this paper seeks to highlight Enwezor’s understanding and usage of the curatorial as a method to think postcoloniality as an embodied practice.