Enwezor’s Model and Copenhagen’s Center for Art on Migration Politics
One of the most remarkable signs of the importance and adaptability of Okwui Enwezor’s work is the way in which the transformative models for exhibition making that he developed have found their way into small-scale institutional spaces and extra-institutional contexts. Resourceful curators across the world have successfully translated his models into critical formats and inventive ways of producing social and political knowledge, carefully adjusted to local contexts and needs. The aim of this article is to trace the influential postcolonial “platforms model” that Enwezor conceptualized for Documenta11 to a small but internationally acclaimed gallery in Copenhagen: the Center for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP). The article falls into three parts. The first part introduces CAMP and the Danish context for migration, before the authors discuss core elements of Enwezor’s exemplary transformation of curating into the creation of platforms for political interventions at his Documenta11 exhibition. The second part seeks to answer three questions: What was the curatorial strategy and multisited structure that Enwezor and his team developed? How did their decolonizing approach help create inclusive, discursive, and curatorial spaces that contested the binaristic perception of the West as the center and the non-West as periphery and offer a vision of the (art) world as profoundly entangled and plurivocal? How has the organization of Documenta11 as a globally distributed network of discursively and conceptually interconnected platforms contributed to restructuring the exhibition venue and to rethinking the interrelationship between the exhibition, as it is traditionally understood as the very core of an art event, and exhibition-related events perceived as collateral, sometimes even dispensable, activities? The third part of the article returns to CAMP to explore the specific translation of Enwezor’s legacy into a small-scale, local art space.