A conversation with Okwui Enwezor - curator

Becker: As the show moves from venue to venue, the site of the exhibition is either overtly or covertly connected historically to the issues that are apparent in the exhibition. How was the show received in Germany?

Enwezor: Many Germans were very upset because there was not enough emphasis on the German colonial project in the exhibition. That was really astonishing, but it was also interesting that very few Germans knew that Berlin was the site of what came to be known as the "scramble for Africa." Germany is, in many ways, the place where the show should start. But the reason it began there is very simple: It was the place where I found a funder for it. We were fortunate in many ways. The reception has been very interesting. I have never made an exhibition where I come back week after week to find presents on my desk--I don't know why--from people of various heritages. So the reception in Germany, surprisingly, has been tremendous and quite different from how I imagine it will be in the United States.

Becker: How have you thought about the show's presence in the U.S.?

Enwezor: I don't know how the show should be framed here, but there are clearly a lot of affinities in terms of the midcentury. Nkrumah said that the midcentury is Africa's since this is the decade of African independence and so on. It seems to me that he was making that statement precisely as many African-Americans and the civil rights movement were entering another phase of possibilities. There is a range of sociopolitical and artistic issues in the exhibition that could be familiar. There is the fact that the Negritude movement in Africa, which was started by Leopold Senghor and Cesaire, was deeply influenced by the work of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. In a recent review in the New York Review of Books of the Guinean Camara Laye's novel The Radiance of the King (which was first published in 1954), Toni Morrison talked about the fact that, as a writer and a novelist, her sense of possibility for herself emerged upon her encounter with the work of African writers--Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Laye , Benna Dadi, Senghor, and others. So there is already a deep affinity on the intellectual level, as well as on the level of the African diaspora, in this part of the world. With this circle coming together again, the show can have a different meaning in the United States than it will have had in Germany.

The exhibition is about providing a framework for a certain type of historicity. The fact is that Africa has not been seen to be historical in any sense of the word. For me the key is to make a show where the idea of Africa being put before the world under mechanisms of mediation from other sectors is no longer possible. Instead it deals with the primary voices that have so skillfully articulated what this mediation has meant.

Becker: I was thinking of what you said about Germany being open and willing to host the exhibition. Germany has done so much work on the archive of its own past.