Disinheriting the Violence of Colonial Modernity: Art, Exhibition-Making, and Infra/Intra-Structural Critique | e-flux Journal
This long-form essay was published on the occasion of the e-flux Journal’s ongoing “After Okwui Enwezor” series, which invites contributors to respond to the influential work of the Nigeria-born curator, art historian, theorist, critic and poet. The essay attempts to recast Enwezor’s theoretical frameworks—as elaborated in his prolific writings and exhibitions—with respect to the current landscape of contemporary art, focusing on this cultural field’s evolving contradictory relationships to discourses and practices of decolonisation, especially in the wake of intersecting global imperial machinations that have transpired over the last year and a half. Using Enwezor’s reflections on the “postcolonial constellation” and multiple modernities, I look specifically at the upsurge of institutional interest in contemporary indigenous art and non-Western modernisms as fertile sites to diagnose these systemic foreclosures and contradictions—contradictions which, I argue, are continually stabilised by the hegemonic art system’s simultaneous liberal-capitalist incorporation and fascistic-colonial repression of decolonial thought and (more importantly) action. Critiquing, elaborating and speculatively extending certain strands of Enwezor’s thinking, I consider how certain artistic practices and curatorial projects (by Cameron Rowland, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, documenta 15 and the Lagos Biennial, among others), which enact a militant shift from postcolonial representationalist paradigms to a concern with material infrastructures and metaphysical “intrastructures,” might better facilitate Enwezor’s call to resist and exceed—in other words, disinherit—the artworld’s built-in racial capitalist foreclosures and asymmetries of power.
Image: Guy Tillim, Colonial-era governor of Quelimane, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Quelimane, Mozambique, 2008. © Guy Tillim. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg / Amsterdam.
