His apartment in Munich was not far from the Hofbräuhaus, but Okwui Enwezor was probably just in the last years of his life not clear if he had really arrived in the center of this city - and indeed in this country. He had many friends here and sometimes he did not feel safe anymore, he even saw the Pegida supporters demonstrating on Mondays near Munich, and he wondered who would help him if something happened to him.
That's how he told it a few months ago.
Enwezor had been seriously ill for several years, he had cancer, he died at age 55, and it's amazing what he has done in this too short life, for the international art world and for the German. And just as amazing is how you duped him here.
How much he was worried, he made clear in August 2018, when he gave the SPIEGEL a long interview. Maybe he had never talked so much about what makes him and what he cares about.
Interview at SPIEGEL +
His homeland is Nigeria, the civil war that broke out in 1967 gave him a difficult childhood, not to forget "that feeling of being constantly in danger of being hunted". He made his adopted home in the USA, where he also studied.
His career in the art world was also connected with Germany, even narrow. After all, he led the Documenta 11 in Kassel, which fascinated a large audience in 2002, it was something of a definitive breakthrough. In 2011 he returned to Germany, became director of the Munich House of Art.
Seven years later, in June 2018, he stopped there, although his contract had not yet expired. The reason for this was not only his illness, although the Bavarian state government so justified the separation. He also felt, as he said, no longer wanted to feel that he had lacked the moral support, his successes were swept under the carpet.
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Okwui Enwezor: thought leader for a new millenniumIn fact, problems had been reported for a while, and employees he had found when he took office triggered a scandal years later because they were suspected of belonging to Scientology and bullying parts of the staff. Added to this, as another difficulty, what Enwezor called a "chronic underfunding".
He had to manage all this, and he needed assistance and advice from his most important employer, the Free State. For him, finally, the question arose, if there had not long been an agenda, one that was directed against him.
Unbroken a superstar
So Germany was almost a constant in both good and bad. Internationally, he was still a superstar. Again and again he was invited to curate important exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale and those in Johannesburg, Gwangju in South Korea, as well as the Triennale of Paris. As a dramaturge and thinker of the arts he had developed something of his own style and his own quality of art representation. His shows included opulence, intellectual aspirations and political awareness, halfpipes and the art of resistance did not exclude each other, he was a discoverer of new talented artists and equally networked with celebrities.
Enwezor was as serious as he was ambitious in changing the look of history and the present with all the visual and emotional power of art, and above all, colonialism and its consequences. Already an early and important exhibition was held in Munich, that was in 2001 in the Museum Villa Stuck, where he described in "The Short Century" the history of the African wars of independence and liberation in an impressive way.
One of his important concerns was to make visible works and currents from those parts of the world that were long ignored in the art scene. For the "New York Times" he was the exhibition maker, who has shaped a "global view of contemporary art", which has triggered a tremendous rethinking.
Hard to underestimate
He also rewrote the history of post-war art with the "Postwar" research and exhibition project, proving once again how absurd it is to geographically limit the view of art and always want to see only the works of the West. Thus, he summarized how artists worldwide reacted to the great traumas after 1945, the Holocaust, but also the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A blockbuster was not this 2016 in the House of Art opened show, and yet their importance, even for the cultural location of Germany, hard to underestimate.
Germany, however, has changed in recent years, virtually around the world sitter Enwezor around, when he came to Munich in 2011, he was more than welcome, just a superstar, through which the local art scene looked more cosmopolitan. But in the end, the country was different, as he thought it was, and he said his content could not fit into the political climate. He himself was repeatedly accused of his lack of knowledge of German, and so he regarded himself personally as "culturally devalued".
For him, for all his professional development, Germany was so important, he said, he has a long and good relationship with this country. "But I'm upset about what it's all about now." For the global art world, there is no question that without Enwezor, she is a poorer one. Maybe this country will realize what it was about him.