by Jon Lackman | 19 August 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
The newspaper Nigerian Compass interviews Okwui Enwezor, who is visiting Nigeria for the first time in 8 years. It appears to ask about Sylvester Ogbechie’s recent indictment of his curatorial practice:
But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African art before you came into the scene?
I think it’s up to evaluators of what I have done to address this question … I know that I came of age as a curator [in New York] at a time of radical transitions on the global sphere … [T]he transitions were of movement, migration, the intersection of many different subjectivities; national imagination, social temporalities and so on … At this particular point, it was almost unimaginable to see the work of an African artist … So, what really set my work apart was that within this small village of New York, there were not that many young curators like myself who were thinking Africa in this particular way. It does not mean there were no African things happening …
How do you see the relationship between African artists based abroad and at home, and how do you work with them?
We do not travel as a band; there are differences in our projects. As it should be, we do not all head one direct[ion] like a delegation … I work with all artists. I understand and I am somewhat sympathetic to current debates that we have; and these debates are not new. We had it in 2002. We are repeating it now; and I see it as part of an anxiety. I am somewhat sympathetic too … [O]ne way to confront this anxiety is to create a situation in which we are not only answering to the hosts somewhere but that we also become host … I have not visited Nigeria for long. But I keep abreast of what people are doing. I would then say that there is a crisis of content production in contemporary Nigerian art … In a place like Lagos, artists here should put their heads together and, through the arts, make Lagos a place that people want to come to. Everybody wants to run to Dakar (Senegal) for example, every two years, because it is a meeting place.
Enwezor says that he plans to “come back for a comprehensive visit of Nigeria, in terms of the arts. That visit would not stop at Lagos or Nsukka. I can certainly tell you that my next visit to Nigeria will be in less than a year.”
