Disinheriting the Violence of Colonial Modernity: Art, Exhibition-Making, and Infra/Intra-structural Critique

A maelstrom of world-historical events emerging within the previous year and a half across various sites of imperial, neocolonial domination calls for a renewed material-discursive orientation to the unfinished project of decolonization and its vexed relationship to the structurally conservative, capital-dependent arena of “global” contemporary art. The eruptions of civil war in Haiti and Sudan, the popular struggles against repressive state apparatuses in Kenya and Palestine, the mass displacement in the Congo, and the ascendency of fascist regimes in Europe and the United States, when viewed as parts of a single constellatory image, evince the desperate, recursive consolidation of a colonial capitalist world order, which a subjected racialized “multitude” threatens to end at any moment.1 For some working within the field of art and culture, a burning question inevitably materializes: What possible conjunctions of ethics and aesthetics, of poetics and politics, are artists, curators, and critics tasked with figuring during this heightened moment of accumulating imperial debris and accelerated mass mobilization?

Confronting similar questions at the turn of the twenty-first century with steely historical clarity and lyricized scholastic verve, the late Nigeria-born curator Okwui Enwezor penned one of his most influential texts, “The Black Box.” Published in 2002 on the occasion of Documenta 11, one of his most widely celebrated exhibitions for which he was the artistic director, Enwezor sets out a series of philosophico-historical propositions to diagnose the rampant political violence of his time as well as account for “the insecurity, instability, and uncertainties” that such violence inspired, particularly in the wake of 9/11.2 Incorporating Frantz Fanon’s ever-relevant treatise on colonial violence in the Wretched of the Earth, Enwezor considers Ground Zero not merely as a melancholic negative space of unspeakable loss and destruction but as a generative metaphorical sign that “represents the clear ground from which the margin has moved to the center in order to reconceptualize the key ideological differences of the present global transition.”3 For Enwezor, the void of Ground Zero indexes the full manifestation of a Fanonian “tabula rasa” in which the entropic unleashing of excessive violence weakens and dissolves the “dead certainties” of the formerly stable Western liberal/imperial global order.4 Such systemic crises present an unforeseen possibility for the global majority, a “founding moment,” wherein subsequent structural reconfigurations allow for their demands to be more fully articulated.5 These articulated demands necessarily include artistic and cultural responses, which, Enwezor observes, “posit a radical departure from the system of hegemony that fuels the present struggle.”6

How might we name what constitutes such a “radical departure” in the present time—marked as it is with the same paranoiac, war-hungry imperial assemblages that haunt Enwezor’s text, but which have reached an even further stage of technological brutishness twenty years later? Where, as Enwezor also asked, might the symbolic space of Ground Zero be located today, amidst the multiplication of global catastrophes and their unmasking of the impotence of liberal democratic regimes and international juridical processes (failing institutions Enwezor presciently thematized in his series of transnational discursive platforms for Documenta 11)?

This text does not set out to answer these questions per se, nor does it seek to provide a historical overview of Enwezor’s career. Rather, in taking seriously Enwezor’s theoretical propositions, most especially his insistence on nurturing a historical consciousness of the present, this text seeks to recast some of his curatorial methodologies and hermeneutic tools with respect to the current landscape of contemporary art. Such a brief exercise, I hope, might clarify and reenergize the social stakes of artistic production within our present planetary predicament.

Introduction

A series of political uprisings against racial, colonial violence, from the Rhodes Must Fall to the Black Lives Matter movements, have come to the fore of global consciousness over the last decade, causing a notable shift in the signified social priorities of various art institutions, from museums and commercial galleries to biennials and art fairs. As a means of appeasing the conscience of the average liberal cultural consumer, terms such as “decolonization” and “racial reckoning” now litter the vocabularies of exhibition press releases and mission statements, and complement internal operational drives for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in hiring practices. Despite recent backlash from far-right reactionaries—the Trump administration’s attack on so-called “wokeism,” for example—these tendencies have yielded a dramatic increase in the number of exhibitions and public programs dedicated to, featuring, and thematizing the aesthetics, discourses, and histories of the racialized global majority.

In one contingent sense, Enwezor and numerous other cultural workers active in the 1990s and 2000s who innovated scholarly and curatorial frameworks to redress the gross geographical and epistemological imbalances in the Western contemporary art field appear to have succeeded in their historical mission. This mission was partly geared towards achieving greater visibility for artists from underrepresented regions of the world (and, in the best cases, was paired with a materialist account of the antagonistic conditions of possibility of such visibility, like in Enwezor’s Documenta). Writing on the shortcomings of a provincialized, Euro-America-centric form of “internationalism” prevalent in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, artist, theorist, curator, and Enwezor’s frequent collaborator Olu Oguibe states that “a new internationalism can only be proposed as an alternative if its object of negation is western internationalism. Otherwise it becomes moribund and irrelevant.”7 Enwezor’s thoughts follow in rhyming succession:

Having abandoned the strictures of “internationalism,” there is now the idea that globalization of artistic discourses opens the doors to greater understandings of the motivations that shape contemporary art across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and South America … Rather than a center, what is much in evidence today are networks and cross-hatched systems of production, distribution, transmission, reception, and institutionalization.8

Oguibe and Enwezor echo the sentiments of a generation of curators and art historians who long expressed their frustrations with either the whole absenting of artistic and cultural knowledge from postcolonial geographies—or what the Argentinian curator Carlos Basualdo referred to as the “new geographies of culture”—in mainstream art historical canons, or the conditional, paternalistic, and often reductive terms of their inclusion in institutional exhibiting contexts.9 Such dynamics of selective inclusion are still very much at play two decades on (hence my insistence on the contingency of their success) but what remains clear is that the methodologies developed by this generation of cultural workers—in their explicit socio-politicization of exhibition themes, their transdisciplinary introduction of discursivity, research, and liveness into curatorial considerations, and their consistent inclusion of artists from so-called global “peripheries,” or what is often today referred to as the “Global South”—have now become instituted as normative procedures within the exhibition, public programming, publishing, and marketing complex of the contemporary art cultural industry.10 For better or worse, these “postcolonial modalities” have most fully been integrated within a particular circuit of artistic production, distribution, and reception, namely the biennial mega-exhibition.

Here I identify two recent developments in this modified contemporary art landscape; closely aligned with the recent “decolonial turn,” these developments seem to put pressure on, and therefore call for a critical revaluation of, the modalities previously identified. The first is the marked increase of institutional interest in the aesthetic interventions of indigenous artists. The second is the proliferation of exhibitions dedicated to unearthing histories of modernism from the non-Western world. Both developments appear to introduce paradigms for the “radical departure” Enwezor describes; however, I argue that such a possibility remains foreclosed by the drives and machinations of racial capital, its onto-epistemological corollaries, and their hegemonic capture of the contemporary art-institutional apparatus. Resisting such closure and charting creative pathways towards the distinctly postcolonial “founding moment” Enwezor theorizes will require a reinvigorated and recalibrated commitment to a set of institutionally reflexive strategies and tactics that sharpen the structural relationships between aesthetic practice and the horizons of liberatory politics.

Resisting the Art World’s Primitivizing Impulse

Without a doubt, indigeneity forms a constituent component of the “postcolonial constellation” through which Enwezor famously schematizes the complexly entangled postimperial geopolitical arrangements of power that came into being after World War II, between “the so-called local and the global, center and margin, nation-state and the individual, transnational and diasporic communities, audiences and institutions.”11 A dialectical framework for thinking the post-1945 global order and its inextricable relation to the dynamism and heterogeneity of contemporary cultural production, the postcolonial constellation buzzes with the violent antinomies of globalization and the emergence of creolized, cosmopolitan modes of artistic and discursive articulation. Enwezor’s formulation is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s historical-materialist thinking on the constellation: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”12

Nolan Oswald Dennis, recurse 4 [3] worlds, 2023. Detail.

In terms of Enwezor’s spatiotemporal propositions about global modernity within this constellatory rubric, he admittedly privileges the historical experience of postcolonial national subjects (and their diasporas) emerging from the wake of colonial sovereign rule—what has been called the Third World—over the experiences of indigenous populations, world over, who are ongoingly subjected to settler-colonial modes of dispossession and provide, via land expropriation and genocidal processes, the means for the establishment of various (even so-called postcolonial) nation-states—what some have referred to as the Fourth World. We see Enwezor’s Third Worldist commitments presented in a range of exhibitions such as “In/sight: African Photographers 1940 to the Present” (1996), “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1954” (2001), and “Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography” (2006). Despite this, I want to insist that Enwezor’s consistent problematization of the reproduction of dichotomizing logics of civilizational difference by Western epistemic matrices—what he sometimes referred to as “Westernism”—proves entirely relevant for assessing the situation of indigenous artists and their accelerated incorporation into the contemporary art-institutional apparatus.13

On the one hand, indigenous struggles, whether they are situated in Africa, Asia, the Americas, or the Pacific, sensitize us to the material registers of decolonization. By staking a concrete claim to dispossessed land, indigenous political positions enflesh the dematerialization of symbolic appeals to decolonization (the preferred avenue of cultural institutions) by reminding us that this process of “total disorder” is not a metaphor.14 However, in many recent cases within the realm of art and culture, indigenous aesthetics have been prized not for their transgenerational contributions to centuries of anticolonial, anti-capitalist, and anarchist struggles but rather because they appear to bear the exotic sign of absolute cultural difference.15 Under the discursive guise of decoloniality, many recent biennial and museum exhibitions in New York, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and various other art-world nodes have presented, without sufficient political contextualization and rigorous metaphysical analysis, the ritualistic performances and craft techniques of artists racially marked as indigenous. These violent acts of decontextualization might then be excused, via convenient (mis)readings of postcolonial theorists such as Glissant, as defiant assertions of the “right to opacity.”16

The reemergence of what one could call a primitivist impulse in contemporary art might be attributed, in part, to the severe alienating affects produced by neoliberal capitalism’s surveillance and media technologies, which heighten contemporary Western society’s libidinal desire to search for and consume, without relational implication, the Other’s ways of life. This primitivist desire, as we have seen time and again in the modern history of the disenchanted West—from Romanticism’s orientalism to European modernism’s negrophilia to the much-analyzed “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition in 1989—partakes in an affective economy of colonial instrumentalization and ethnographic titillation whereby predominantly white-run cultural institutions exhibit the art of the Other so that their majority-white, middle-class audiences can experience temporary cathartic release from the ossified strictures of Western techno-scientific reason. Enwezor’s polemical art criticism and politically antagonistic exhibitions, as well his founding of the contemporary African art journal Nka in 1994, were largely formed in response to a similarly insidious form of neo-primitivism that took hold in the late 1980s and 1990s in the wake of neoliberal globalization. During this period, the West’s hunger for the cultural Other, triggered by so-called postmodernist transformations in networks of capitalist production that intensified proximities between the margin and the center, came with certain hang-ups—one of them being the dismissal of racialized and non-Euro-American artists, especially those academically trained in the West, whose works did not conform to colonial expectations of cultural authenticity or conceptual naivete. As Oguibe relevantly notes, “To primitivise is to make more tolerable, more containable, less competitive, less threatening. Its purpose, ultimately, is to freeze all those whose origins lie in the former colonies of Europe in the precise historical moment of their defeat.”17 (It is worth noting that even when attempts are made to ameliorate this chronopolitical desire to “freeze” the Other—for instance, through representational combinations of indigenous cosmologies with digital technologies or industrial robotics—such attempts typically remain superficial and do not offer fundamental critiques of “technology” as such but only serve to reify the linear temporal distance between a folkloric past and a digitized or industrialized present/future.)

On the other hand, indigenous critiques likewise foreground the equally important metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Before I proceed with this line of thought, it is important to mention that metaphysics was not a prioritized register of analysis in Enwezor’s postcolonial dialectical-materialist thinking; the closest he might have come to this was in his essay “Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on African Conceptualism,” where he (briefly) touches on an animist concept from Igbo thought. Speculatively posing African aesthetics as articulating, avant la lettre, conceptualism’s dematerialization of the art object, Enwezor writes, “Where there is something standing which can be seen, there is something else standing next to it which cannot be seen but which accompa­nies the object. In its material basis, African art is object-bound, but in its meaning and intention it is paradoxically anti-object and anti-perceptual, bound by the many ways of conveying ideas whereby speech or oral com­munication are highly valued.”18 The lack of engagement with metaphysics in Enwezor’s work might be attributed to four factors: his early training in political science and therefore his taking to the social-scientific registers of militarism, geopolitics, and economics; the influence on him of postcolonial and critical social theorists such as Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault, who focused more on cross-cultural formations, problems of translation, questions of the public sphere, and transhistorical ruptures over explicit metaphysical interrogations (which at the time may have been viewed as exercises in ideological obscuration); his effort to strategically bypass exoticist expectations by choosing not to directly engage indigenous systems of knowledge and instead foreground the realism of the documentary mode;19 and, given the location, period, and orientation of his intellectual formation, his divergence from the politicized ontological and epistemological imperatives presented in Latin American decolonial theory and in the most recent wave of black (feminist) critical theory.

Revising the methodological limitations above, I argue that indigenous struggles for self-determination and land repatriation are not articulated merely on a reactive, or perhaps materialist, basis of mitigating colonial domination, but more critically, that these struggles are given their unruly substance through intergenerational transferences of dynamic, indeterminate structures of being and knowing. Such indigenous onto-epistemological structures—and I mean to evoke an incalculably entangled plurality here—exist in contemporaneous tension with the colonial present and put pressure on the modern/colonial secularist enclosures that inform a majority of mainstream political science, Western critical theory, and even Anglophone postcolonial discourse. This is because, despite the radical aspirations of the aforementioned intellectual traditions, they have often reinscribed (through serially attempted negations) a set of sedimented ontological dualisms inaugurated by hegemonic post-Enlightenment thought—e.g., distinctions between spirit and matter, nature and culture, life and death. What is therefore proposed (and often overlooked) in a number of indigenous aesthetic practices is their structural capacity to illumine alternative metaphysical grammars, many of which, in preceding and exceeding the sense-making boundaries of Western onto-epistemological formations—that is, the constitutive exclusions that cohere colonial modernity’s thresholds—are opportunely armed with a potent liberatory power to break through and scramble the dichotomizing conceptual pillars upholding the West’s “cognitive empire.”20 Furthermore, these decolonial metaphysical critiques—for example, when fiercely unleashed and made to “toil” within the encircling racialized field of modern aesthetics21—might then, in turn, create the conditions of possibility for enacting material transformations of social, political, and economic realities.22 Therefore, even though I have made “material” and “metaphysical” distinctions in this text for analytical purposes, indigenous struggles (as well as the black radical tradition) show us that these planes are, in truth, deeply enmeshed and mutually constitutive. As the anti-colonial Guinean delegation at the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers argued, “Material cultural production and spiritual cultural production are dialectically linked and stimulate each other.”23 This delegation was involved at the time in a revolutionary armed struggle against the Portuguese—an important historical context for deciphering the political impulse behind Enwezor’s exhibitions—and understood culture as an amorphous totality of material and immaterial aspects, further echoing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who declared:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.24

Yet, within art spaces, indigenous spiritual or metaphysical interventions often remain politically neutralized (divorced from their dialectical interaction with existing material conditions) either because they are framed as producing wholly untranslatable and transcendental categories of knowledge or, via diluted appeals to “epistemic disobedience” or the floating signifier of “the otherwise,” tend to lack meticulously specified philosophical models and parameters.25 A noteworthy counterexample here is the Mexican art group Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, whose experimental film works, informed by Meso-American myths as well as agitprop and local resistance movements—contrasting elements that define their guiding methodical framework of “shamanic materialism”—seek to enact a “political film-trance of agitation” that disarticulates the spectatorial regimes of corporate and state media.26 While, of course, one must recognize the partially unmappable coordinates of particular onto-epistemologies in relation to hegemonic Western cognitive schemas, institutional framings that disarm spiritually inclined indigenous aesthetic practices in the manners specified above do a disservice to decolonizing struggles: first, by reifying colonial dichotomies of unbridgeable civilizational difference between the West and the rest; second, by reproducing the notion that non-Western knowledges are beyond our capacities for reasoning, as such27; and third, by absolving public audiences, curators, and critics from critically engaging these alternative systems of thought to produce what decolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls an “ecology of knowledges.”28 Put differently, within spaces of contemporary art, subjugated indigenous metaphysical schemas are too often domesticated and ornamentalized rather than critically (or speculatively) elaborated and structurally “put to work.”29 This potentially dangerous slippage into indigenous romanticism and cultural essentialism is perhaps the reason why Enwezor, and other Global South curators and theorists of his generation, thought it more effective to prioritize materialist frames of analysis. Take, for example, Enwezor’s artistic directorship of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial (involving curators from around the world including Hou Hanru, Kellie Jones, Gerardo Mosquera, Yu Yeon Kim, Octavia Zaya, and Colin Richards), which focused on geopolitical and economic issues of nationalism, citizenship, border crossings, and globalizing trade routes. In my view, these framings, as necessary as they were and continue to be, cede too much ideological, spiritual, and cosmological ground to the colonial-capitalist opposition. As de Sousa Santos writes, “There is no social justice without cognitive justice,” and furthermore, “we do not need alternatives; we need rather an alternative thinking of alternatives.”30 Challenging the impasses of classic postcolonial thought, Denise Ferreira da Silva similarly proposes that what is at stake in decolonization is not only a rethinking of the relationship between processes of colonial/racial differentiation and capital accumulation—entwined processes which power the political-economic infrastructures of global contemporary art production and display—but a fundamental critique of what she calls coloniality’s “intrastructures,” that is, the “micro forms and pillars that compose modern thought, and those that enter into the constitution of concepts and categories and are presupposed (as the operative element) in its formulations.”31

Generatively modifying Enwezor’s postcolonial realism, da Silva’s provocation helps clarify my proposition that the heterogenous anarchic grammars offered by contemporary indigenous art continue to be restrained by the subsumptive hydraulics of racial capital and its accompanying colonial metaphysics precisely because, if rigorously followed to their logical conclusions and materially implemented in daily practice, such grammars risk dissolving (as opposed to merely reforming) the very world instituted by “Man,” and in turn, the counterrevolutionary institutional models, hierarchal value systems, and expropriative and exploitative economic mechanisms upholding the globalized contemporary art world as we know it.32

Global South Modernisms: Transgressing Formalist Enclosures

The art world’s colonial capitalist engulfment of indigenous possibility (though never total) mirrors its institutional capture of Global South modernisms, which ironically, in many cases, were aesthetic byproducts of one of the most considerable threats to capitalism’s world-systemic reproduction in recent history: the anti-colonial national liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Indexed by an archival density of tricontinental conferences, publications, posters, films, and songs (which regularly featured in Enwezor’s exhibitions, most notably “The Short Century,” and now even more so in a number of recent art exhibitions), this 1950–70s era of proliferating militant, anti-colonial activity evinced the global optimism of a certain generation tasked with challenging colonial sovereign rule and reconfiguring a Cold War geopolitical world order controlled by Soviet-communist and Western capitalist imperial interests. The so-called triumph of capitalism following the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall therefore leaves not only the failed realization of communism but also the incomplete project of decolonization as an unresolved specter that perpetually returns to haunt and destabilize the contemporary neocolonial world order.33 Such ravenous specters have made their presence known through the twenty-first century unfolding of untenable imperialist-capitalist contradictions in Haiti, Sudan, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, the Congo, Bangladesh, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and numerous other embattled sites.

In contradistinction to modernisms emerging within the West and their privileging of individual artistic autonomy, modernisms in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have often been tied to historical processes of anti-colonial national liberation and the collective cultural articulation of novel postcolonial subjectivities. These artistic modernisms are given methodological coherence in Enwezor’s thinking by his adoption of the multiple modernity thesis: wherein modernity is not seen as a monocultural and unifocal phenomenon emerging only in the West, but is constituted via the relational dynamics established by the capitalist world-system between overdeveloped imperial metropoles and underdeveloped colonial peripheries, engendering cultural and material negotiations in a plurality of locales that give rise to multiply situated “petit modernities.” 34 Modernisms of the Global South can be viewed as aesthetic analogues of these world-historical processes, as they contain the antagonistic traces of unfinished, cross-cultural encounters and experiments ushered in by modernity and its animating racial and colonial dialectics. Here, we might consider artists including the Mozambican painter Malangatana Ngwenya and his association with the guerrilla wing of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in the 1960s; the Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun and her Marxist-feminist anti-colonial activism in the 1940s and 1950s; the Sudanese drawer and painter Ibrahim El-Salahi and his role as a cultural attaché to the socialist Sudanese government in the late 1960s and 1970s; and the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam and his development of a distinctly Afro-surrealist style stemming from his proximity to anti-fascist and anti-imperialist political groups between the 1930s and 1960s.35

Inji Efflatoun, Soldier (Fedayeen), 1970. Courtesy Safarkhan Art Gallery.

In more recent times, however, these global modernisms have been mummified by the historicist, museological logics of the contemporary art-institutional complex, even despite the stated decolonial intentions of various curators. With few exceptions, many recent exhibitions exploring these subterranean histories of African, Arab, Asian, and Latin American modernisms in London, New York, Venice, and other geographical sites either disarm (through a methodological synthesis of regressive art-historical formalism and academized decolonial discourse) the radicality of artworks grounded in insurgent, anti-imperial imaginaries, or inappropriately radicalize (through a misapplication of the Manichean divide between colonizer and colonized that does not factor in class stratifications) the work of socioeconomically privileged artists of the “native bourgeoise” who were in truth more structurally proximate to the cosmopolitan flows of international monopoly finance than to the anti-colonial struggles of the subaltern masses.36

Given their convenient temporal location in a nostalgized past and their predominantly conservative materialization as painting and sculpture, many of these global modernist works are easily and violently assimilated into the art world’s neutralizing symbolic agenda of canonical diversity and inclusion. Furthermore, in shifting now fashionable “decolonial” concerns towards the early and mid-twentieth century, these exhibitions do not in fact resist the pressures of the speculative art market (as was claimed by critics responding to the 60th Venice Biennial especially) but nourish new avenues for capital’s valorization by strengthening and expanding the secondary art market. As records from regional sales departments in major auction houses will show, market valuations of numerous Global South modernists have only escalated in recent years and are predicted to increase further, with many of their works being prized, like in Western markets, as rarefied commodities by their respective ruling, collecting classes.37 Therefore, in line with capital’s affinity for spectacle and commodification—which function to flatten and conceal structural antagonisms as well as foreclose noncapitalist futures—many of these exhibitions’ aloof historicism and object-centered formalism (infra)structurally work against their decolonizing aims.

Rather than being disciplined by art-historical orders of knowledge into stable objects of economic value and aesthetic appreciation—not unlike the thousands of objects looted from the non-Western world which found their way into the sanitized vitrines of Western museums—postcolonial modernist works, I suggest, ought to be politically reanimated and discursively refracted through an array of anti-disciplinary procedures. Consistent with and extending Enwezor’s refusal of disciplinarity in his prioritization of postcolonial methods of “subversion, hybridization, creolization, displacement, and reassemblage,” these procedures would be aimed at deciphering the historical struggles embodied by these modernist artworks and, more importantly, connecting said struggles to contemporary aesthetic investigations, economic conditions, social movements, and technological configurations.38 Enwezor enacted these methods in 2002 as artistic director of Documenta 11 with the development of a series of transdisciplinary, discourse-led “platforms” in Lagos, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Vienna that preceded, horizontally paralleled, and therefore decentred the final exhibition platform in Kassel. He enacted them again in 2015 as artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale with an integrated “Arena” section that involved a live, continuous reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital alongside an extensive program of socially inflected musical performances and film screenings. These performative reanimations, which, in my view, take seriously the animist insights mentioned earlier regarding Enwezor’s thinking about African aesthetics and its “anti-object” meanings and intentions, could not be more critical than in our time where, akin to the tricontinental resistance models fostered by mid-twentieth century liberation struggles, we are tasked with the responsibility of building transnational solidarity networks capable of transcending hermetic provincialisms and dead-end identitarianisms.

Further reminding us that discursive and curatorial procedures proper to the history of art are inextricable from the development of the Western academy, and are therefore thrown into crisis by the postcolonial constellation, Enwezor writes that

any critical interest displayed towards exhibition systems that takes as its field of study modern or contemporary art necessarily refers us to the foundational base of modern art history and its roots in imperial discourse, on the one hand, and, on the other, the pressures that postcolonial discourse exerts on its narratives today.39

By exposing and problematizing the imperial base, these postcolonial pressures (exerted by the aesthetic intelligence and historical accretions of these global modernist works) necessarily call for unruly, differentially articulated exhibition systems. Such systems, as alluded to above, would refuse the formalist erasures and historicist enclosures inflicted upon anti-colonial thought, and rather propose, in a performative, indeterminate modality, what Enwezor refers to as a “communicative, dialogic forum of conversations between heterogenous actors, publics, and objects.”40 This “forum,” this “parliament of forms” as Enwezor alternatively put it, announces the choreographic terms of emergence of an improvised, mobile, always-incomplete ensemble, a comm(o/u)ning arena of anarchic sociality which, as Fred Moten notes, bursts with a “melodramatic irruption” that upsets any pretense to orderly, formalized relation.41

Tactics and Strategies Against Institutional Capture: Disinheriting Colonial Violence

The gross failure of most art and academic institutions to address the emergent global imperial crises exposes the illusory basis of their liberal claims to “progress” as well as their inextricable material complicity with a plutocratic ruling class. Indeed, what to make of these institutions’ (selective) appeals to decolonial and racial justice when their individual, corporate, and state funders are the direct beneficiaries of neocolonial arrangements which perpetuate the subjugation of the very Global South societies that these institutions then seek to culturally represent?

Ushering in the “global transition” Enwezor speaks of will therefore require going beyond representational postcolonial gambits that simply aim to feature and include marginalized discursive traditions and artistic legacies—methods that may indeed have had radical material impacts at an earlier time when the contemporary art world’s concern with global peripheries and exiled diasporas was far from normative. In the present context, where such symbolic modalities have largely been subsumed and domesticated by global capital, what might be required rather is the construction of a transnational, counter-hegemonic phalanx that is capable of sustaining palpable assaults on, and prefiguring structural alternatives to, the dominant institutional networks that comprise the global contemporary art world. In other words, I speak here of a renewed and collectively enunciated cultural militancy (unmoored from the nationalist and heteropatriarchal determinations of much anti-colonial thought) that is committed to, on the one hand, forcefully destabilizing, and on the other hand, thinking beyond, the material infrastructures and metaphysical intrastructures governing the institutional landscape of contemporary art and its built-in racial-capitalist asymmetries of power. (Though I have grounded these interventionist protocols within the field of art as a starting point, what is at stake, à la Enwezor, is art’s dislocation from its rarefied spheres of concern and its reconstitution within an anti-disciplinary, sociopolitical field of broadened knowledge production and organized action.)

In the former “deconstructive” camp, we might locate tactics and strategies that have (within Western art-historical discourses) been retroactively placed under the (always insufficient) umbrella of “institutional critique.” Enwezor was, rightly, skeptical of the revolutionary capacities projected onto practices within this art-historical genealogy, often expressing his impatience with the general lack of reflexivity around their Euro-America-centric enclosures.42 (Despite his criticisms, Enwezor consistently worked with many artists from this amorphous canon, including Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, Maria Eichhorn, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Renée Green, to name just a few.43) Still, Enwezor argues that the (neo-) avant-garde impulse presented by institutional critique could potentially meet the political exigencies engendered by twenty-first century imperial machinations so long as it undergoes a fundamental rethinking by way of expanding what he understands as its hitherto narrow cultural and geographic locus.

Cameron Rowland

 

Encumbrance, 2020

Mortgage; mahogany double doors: 12 Carlton House Terrace, ground floor, front entrance

 

Encumbrance, 2020

Mortgage; mahogany door: 12 Carlton House Terrace, ground floor, reception to gallery

 

Encumbrance, 2020

Mortgage; mahogany door: 12 Carlton House Terrace, ground floor, reception to hallway

 

Encumbrance, 2020

Mortgage; mahogany door: 12 Carlton House Terrace, ground floor, hallway to gallery 

 

Encumbrance, 2020

Mortgage; mahogany handrail: 12 Carlton House Terrace, stairwell, ground floor to first floor

 

The property relation of the enslaved included and exceeded that of chattel and real estate. Plantation mortgages exemplify the ways in which the value of people who were enslaved, the land they were forced to labor on, and the houses they were forced to maintain were mutually constitutive. Richard Pares writes that “[mortgages] became commoner and commoner until, by 1800, almost every large plantation debt was a mortgage debt.” Slaves simultaneously functioned as collateral for the debts of their masters, while laboring intergenerationally under the debt of the master. The taxation of plantation products imported to Britain, as well as the taxation of interest paid to plantation lenders, provided revenue for Parliament and income for the monarch.

 

Mahogany became a valuable British import in the 18th century. It was used for a wide variety of architectural applications and furniture, characterizing Georgian and Regency styles. The timbers were felled and milled by slaves in Jamaica, Barbados, and Honduras among other British colonies. It is one of the few commodities of the triangular trade that continues to generate value for those who currently own it.

 

After taking the throne in 1820, George IV dismantled his residence, Carlton House, and the house of his parents, Buckingham House, combining elements from each to create Buckingham Palace. He built Carlton House Terrace between 1827 and 1832 on the former site of Carlton House as a series of elite rental properties to generate revenue for the Crown. All addresses at Carlton House Terrace are still owned by the Crown Estate, manager of land owned by the Crown since 1760.

 

12 Carlton House Terrace is leased to the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The building includes four mahogany doors and one mahogany handrail. These five mahogany elements were mortgaged by the Institute of Contemporary Arts to Encumbrance Inc. on January 16th, 2020 for £1000 each. These loans will not be repaid by the ICA. As security for these outstanding debts, Encumbrance Inc. will retain a security interest in these mahogany elements. This interest will constitute an encumbrance on the future transaction of 12 Carlton House Terrace. An encumbrance is a right or interest in real property that does not prohibit its exchange but diminishes its value. The encumbrance will remain on 12 Carlton House Terrace as long as the mahogany elements are part of the building. As reparation, this encumbrance seeks to limit the property’s continued accumulation of value for the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate provides 75% of its revenue to the Treasury and 25% directly to the monarch.

Courtesy of Cameron Rowland.

We can identify these generative expansions among a variety of artists working today, the practice of Cameron Rowland being just one example. Rowland’s sculptures and contractual pieces legally and economically implicate art institutions in contemporary financialized circuits of racial capital—globalized circuits with city-specific nodes, which, as the artist’s footnoted exhibition essays show, are always structurally wedded to the exorbitant material gains of the transatlantic slave trade and its transhistorically adaptive regimes of gratuitous violence. Extending the (extra-)aesthetic methods pioneered by the aforementioned genealogy of institutional critical artists, some of Rowland’s works push beyond mere implication and articulate, with poetic understatement and counter-juridical precision, the abolitionist horizons of the black radical tradition, for instance: by making a nonprofit art institution a legal custodian of a tax-exempt trust whose value-accruing corporate shares must be liquidated and distributed in the future event that US reparations are ever officially made (Disgorgement, 2016); by decelerating the rate of capital growth of the Crown Estate through the creation of a financial entity that retains a security interest in an art institution’s mortgaged assets of royal provenance (Encumbrance, 2020); or by legally burdening a German art institution, and by extension the city government of which it is a sub-department, with the financial responsibility of repaying an infinitely increasing debt (Bankrott, 2023). Working more in the immediate register of direct action, we might also consider the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), a coalition of various groups of organized cultural workers whose disruptive, aesthetically attuned protests and cultural boycotts of strategically chosen cultural venues bring visceral awareness to the exploitative laboring conditions of migrant workers, most especially those involved with the construction of the Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi.44 The point of these temporary performative actions, the group states, is not to incite charity, but rather to build robust internationalist networks of solidarity between workers, cultural or otherwise.45 Taken together, these entwined artistic and political strategies introduce irreconcilable material antagonisms into “civilized” spaces of art in the West that disturb their normative systemic procedures and expose their historical and ongoing reliance on barbaric, racially dispossessive tomes of private and public capital.

In the latter “reconstructive” camp, we might look to certain biennial editions whose reflexive curatorial propositions facilitate structural reconfigurations of exhibition systems that, in turn, critique the conservative, power-affirming conditions of most presentations of global contemporary art while presenting workable alternative possibilities. Having curated multiple biennials over the course of his career on various continents, Enwezor was well aware of the implication of these mega-exhibitions in ever-expanding circuits of global capital and the logic of spectacle. Yet, he often argued that these exhibition sites could be strategically reappropriated to introduce “new relations of spectatorship whose program of social differentiation, political expression, and cultural specificity reworks the notion of spectacle and constructs it as the site of new relations of power and cultural translation.”46 Holding these contradictory potentials together, I will speak of two exhibitions here for purposes of brevity—Documenta 15 and the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial.

Much has been written about Documenta 15, especially in relation to several controversies (which I will not engage here), but what should not be overlooked is its concrete implementation of alternative, non-Western “resource building” and “equitable distribution” practices.47 Organized by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, Documenta 15 constitutes one of the most formidable curatorial attempts within the last decade to wrest Western art institutions from their conventionally exploitative, opportunistic, and non-implicated relation to the aesthetic and discursive productions of Global South cultural workers. The exhibition, an institutionally reflexive rejoinder to Enwezor’s representation-focused postcolonial edition, was animated by ruangrupa’s central concept of “lumbung,” which literally means “rice barn” but more importantly indexes collectivist social practices in Indonesian rural communities where “the surplus harvest is stored in communal rice barns and distributed for the benefit of the community according to jointly defined criteria.”48 Directly opposed to the private appropriation of surplus value encountered in capitalist modes of production, lumbung materially enacted a redirection of the European institution’s resources towards decentrally selected networks of predominantly black, brown, and indigenous cultural workers working in globally dispersed zones that have been violently underdeveloped by the colonial-capitalist world system. This communal, resource-sharing ethos yielded considerable autonomy on the part of the exhibition’s global-majority individual and collective collaborators, allowing them to circulate resources within their localized spheres of concern. Additionally, the exhibition element in Kassel largely challenged the spectacle-driven logics of many neo-multicultural large-scale biennials: the de-prioritization of displaying aesthetically pleasing objects from far-flung corners of the earth for mostly white, European, middle-class viewers was balanced with involving said viewers as active group participants in ongoingly produced discursive and sensorial social fields.

Documenta 15, unlike most other polished biennials in the well-funded West, introduced a frugal, precarious, unpredictable, makeshift spirit that complemented what biennials operating in postcolonial contexts, especially on the African continent, have long embodied and practiced. Clarifying the vastly heterogeneous conditions of cultural production that biennials in different regions of the world face, Enwezor states that “not all biennales function along the logic of spectacle,” and depending on where they arise, “those working in and addressing specific artistic contexts, often work as low budget, modest projects.”49 This is especially the case with the Lagos Biennial, which was founded in 2017 and produced its most recent fourth edition in 2024.50 The Lagos Biennial differs from Documenta in many crucial respects: it has been around for less than a decade; it has not yet established itself as a mandatory destination for the jet-setting art establishment; and it does not receive substantial funding from the state (or a singular private foundation). Paradoxically, these very structural constraints generated the imperfect conditions for elaborating a series of trans-local, experimental, and improvisational artistic and architectural propositions. Responding to this edition’s overarching theme of “refuge” and its aims to “reassess the promises, disappointments, and ongoing ramifications of the nation-state model,” such independently organized individual and collective aesthetic propositions—the project I curated, Traces of Ecstasy, being among them51—took the form of makeshift installations and prototypical pavilions. These structures-in-process, dissonantly juxtaposed, were all presented in the historically significant outdoor location of Tafawa Balewa Square—a site, named after Nigeria’s first and only prime minister, which bore spatial witness to the country’s independence celebrations in 1960 and now hosts a distinctly postcolonial amalgam of extemporaneous functions, ranging from state ceremonies and commercial fairs to Pentecostal church services and musical concerts. Actualizing such transnational cultural assemblies in these zones of historical underdevelopment, ephemeral as they might be, revitalizes and specifies the material stakes of decolonizing processes in the uneven globalized landscape of contemporary art.52 By occurring outside the constrained epistemological parameters of the Western imperial metropole, these precariously assembled “forums,” to borrow Enwezor’s term, catalyze potentially liberatory pathways towards the production, reception, and distribution of experimental cultures which, over time, could mobilize and buttress transnational political networks of anti-imperialist struggle.53

To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this text, on how cultural workers might reorient themselves within the latest episode of modernity’s prolonged state of emergency, we might turn to the words of the political revolutionary, agronomist, and philosopher-historian Amílcar Cabral. In his 1970 essay “National Liberation and Culture,” Cabral soberingly notes that “to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life.”54 Cabral understood the indisputable role of artistic and cultural production in the material and ideological advancement and establishment of particular visions of planetary existence—not unlike the worrisome, rapidly mobilizing global far right.55 And so as Enwezor also observes, the inevitable task, which confronts the majority of the world’s population (whether they like it or not), is precisely one of “disinheriting the violence of colonial modernity.”56 This unfinished task of “delinking” from colonial, imperial power, though nourished and sustained by the oblique, imaginative mediations of art, cannot, and should not, be contained by the Janus-faced liberal/imperial dimensions of global contemporary art institutionality.57 We must instead look to develop a dynamic multitude of historically attuned, liberation-led, structurally antagonistic tactics and strategies, bound neither to paralyzing fantasies of aesthetic autonomy nor sociological reducibility, that can enervate existing institutional infra/intra-structures so as to usher in a “possible tabula rasa for a future recomposition.”58