Okwui Enwezor in South Africa: Worldly Curating and Its Discontents

Abstract

In Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the first large biennial that he would direct in the course of an extraordinary career of curatorial experimentation, curator Okwui Enwezor presciently selected art that explored themes of migration, cultural traffic, and sites of crisis. This essay by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green explains that his biennial occurred at precisely such a moment of crisis in postapartheid South Africa, when attention from the restlessly moving international art world biennial circuit meant little to local audiences, who were struggling with ongoing inequalities, economic hardships, financial uncertainties and constant change in their municipal power structures. This eventually led to a shut-down of the Biennale before its scheduled end.