A conversation with Okwui Enwezor - curator

Becker: I am trying to imagine what it would be like to see the show not having read the catalogue, because the book is so comprehensive. How do you envision your audience relating to both those entities--is there an ideal way for the two to interact?

Enwezor: I think the exhibition is self-sufficient in terms of what it provides. Even I, as curator of the show, am overwhelmed when I walk through it because it has such an incredible emotional resonance. The exhibition has been designed to be inside the head of the visitors, what I call the tide of voices moving back and forth, carrying you forward, stopping you. It's an experience that a book cannot provide. The exhibition allows for engagement not only with the historical material but with the work of artists themselves. The catalogue can never represent the immensity, force, and power of any given artwork. Conversely, there are things that cannot possibly be visualized or encapsulated in the exhibition. They require the public to get to the second strength, if you will, of the encounter with the entire project by going to the catalogue. The anthology section is one of the few instances, if not the first ever, that this written material has been gathered together. It contains some of the primary resources that have shaped the consciousness of Africa today. I think that one without the other is not quite possible.

Becker: Did you think that the study of decolonialization intrinsically needed a new kind of methodology as a subject, that it needed a different approach for the audience?

Enwezor: What we have done in The Short Century is really not unique. Exhibitions of this nature have been made in different contexts, such as the series mounted by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris when it first opened Paris/New York, Paris/Berlin, Paris/Moscow. And there has been a range of historical shows that looked at the intersection between political and ideological forces and the ways in which artists and intellectuals responded. However, for a continent that is really an unknown quantity, one that not many people have been in contact with in any substantial way, it presents a very different challenge in terms of the kind of material that you can put into an exhibition. How do people apprehend, distill, and interpret the range of materials that may not yield their full meaning on a visual platform alone? Working with both primary resources and interpretations of those resources was crucial. Chronologically, the exhibition ends in 1994 only to mark that point of transition and the beginning of some thing else. More important, it has two bookends. One is 1884 to 1945. In 1884 the year-long Berlin Conference began; it was the source of the Berlin Congo Act, which resulted in the partition of Africa among the European powers. The show does not really touch the process of colonization. But it touches the results, of course. The second bookend is the postapartheid period, which for me really represents the exhibition: the continuous meditation by intellectuals and artists on the subject of decolonialization: on the aporias of decolonization, the discontinuities of decolonialization, and the problematics of the heritage of decolonization. We know today that there is an immense tragedy unfolding in the Congo. I was reading not too long ago that in the past five years, as the rest of the world has stood in silence, six million people have died as a result of this conflict. Then there is the thirteen-year civil war in the Sudan, the conflicts in other areas of the Great Lakes in Central Africa, Angola, and so on . So this is not only a celebration of decolonialization. What you will find in the post--1994 period are the tools with which artists and intellectuals are beginning to critique and question the heritage that still needs to be unpacked as we move forward.