AA hearse stands on the first floor of the New Museum in New York, sawed through in the middle and coated with black tar. Rusted pipes well up from under its wheels. Exhaust pipes and silencers hang over him, as if to announce an impending storm. A cage made of almost ceiling-high bars surrounds the work. It’s a brutal, strange installation by Caribbean-born American artist Nari Ward. A symbol of violence, loss and the struggle for survival in an apocalyptic world. Ward’s sculpture “Peace Keeper” is part of the exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”, probably the most political and possibly also the most personal art show that the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor developed while he was still alive. And which has now opened at the New Museum in New York, almost exactly two years after his death from cancer in March 2019.
Enwezor had worked on “Grief and Grievance” until the end. He wanted to present them for the 2020 presidential election. Because the subject was so acute, so explosive. And is. Enwezor wanted to draw attention to the “grief” (“grief”) of black Americans, whose pure existence parts of the white majority society in which they live see as a constant cause for “lament” (“grievance”).
Its elegance inspired the world
It is an unusual exhibition for Enwezor, says Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, in an interview. Only works by African Americans are shown. Because of this narrow geographical focus, the exhibition is “an anomaly in Enwezor’s career,” says Gioni. He never got around to asking Enwezor why he only selected black artists. Nevertheless, it was always clear that Enwezor wanted to see “Grief and Grievance” as a “political, almost militant statement”.
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Diamond Stingily’s installation “Entryways” from 2016
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Bild: Queer Thoughts, New York
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When Enwezor died, a team of curators and close confidants set about taking up his ideas and plans for the exhibition and implementing them with a little delay due to the pandemic. 85 percent of the curatorial work comes from Enwezor, says Gioni. Even if the exhibition would have been a little different if Enwezor had looked after it to the end. Enwezor was considered a key figure in the internationalization of the art world. From the beginning of his career he has worked on expanding the West-centric concept of art. And was enormously successful with it. He was the first non-European to head Documenta 11 in 2002 and the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, as the first curator to come from Africa. Enwezor set an enormous pace. All over the world he organized exhibitions, published essays and books, was part of juries, curatorial teams and taught at the major universities. His energy, his curiosity, his inventiveness, his charm and his elegance inspired the world.
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