Okwui Enwezor Archives

What We’re Reading #5: Autumn 2025

From vaporwave-inflected exhibition-making to the recurring debates around Diane Arbus’ work, the latest instalment of What We’re Reading gathers texts that follow the circulation of style, ethics, politics, and power through curation, criticism and photography – exploring, by turns, where art is made palatable and where it speaks with urgency. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay considers how photographs from Gaza might resist their conscription into state propaganda, while Mariam Barghouti’s Eyes of Truth mourns the killing of Palestinian journalists, exposing an economy that prizes accolades over protecting media personnel.

Thomas King | Resource | 18 September 2025
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The Eyes of Truth | Mariam Barghouti for DAZED MENA, September 2025

“You see us only in trends of certain events, which would last for hours and then that’s it. We’re just numbers for the world, or non-existent.” So said photojournalist Mariam Riyad Abu Dagga, who was photographed and interviewed for DAZED MENA Issue 3. She was brutally killed just two weeks later by Israeli forces in a targeted strike on Nasser Hospital, along with four other journalists, Ahmed Abu Aziz, Hussam al-Masri, Mohammad Salama, and Moaz Abu Taha. Barghouti writes about Mariam’s wrenching decision to send her son Ghaith out of Gaza after their home was bombed, the loss of her mother soon after and Mariam’s own death.

As Israel’s campaign of slaughter continues, and a leaked White House plan reportedly calls for Gaza’s total displacement under U.S. trusteeship for a decade, Barghouti passionately denounces Western media that offers only belated awards, headlines and hollow sympathy, while never protecting or defending Palestinian media personnel: ‘Say their names, cite their work, defend their lives. Widen the record until it can be held. Allow Ghaith to inherit a world that finally learned to listen.’

Okwui Enwezor | Oluremi C. Onabanjo for 4Columns, September 2025

Duke University Press have published two volumes of selected writings from the larger-than-life figure, Okwui Enwezor, offering an invaluable resource for understanding his multifaceted contributions to contemporary art and curatorial practice. In her review on 4Columns, MoMA’s Oluremi C. Onabanjo casts a clear and discerning eye on the late writer’s intellectual and curatorial legacy; his essays and exhibitions (including his selection to curate the Documenta 11 in 2002) consistently challenging Western-centric art discourses, destabilising conventional notions of geography and periodisation, and foregrounding historically marginalised perspectives. While acknowledging Enwezor’s ‘lack of substantive engagement with Black feminist theorists’ and other contemporary critiques, Onabanjo emphasises a rare synthesis of literary sensibility, curatorial ambition and poetics that positions his varied contributions as foundational for future generations of artists, scholars and curators. These volumes, she writes, ‘demonstrate the continued utility of examining Enwezor’s positions – not only for what he engendered, but for what he provoked.’

A Massive Diane Arbus Exhibition Does So Little | Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic, June 2025

Hyperallergic’s coverage of the Diane Arbus: Constellation exhibition at New York’s Park Avenue Armory sparked a mixed chorus of responses in the publication’s Instagram comments, reflecting the contentious ethical debates still surrounding her work. In his review, Bishara immediately flags Arbus’ ‘freak photographs of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people,’ often ‘ambushed in asylums and hospitals,’ as caught in a classist gaze and exhibited without confronting this long-standing ethical fault line. He argues the show’s labyrinthine installation, lack of chronology or thematic grouping, and ban on visitor photography turn 455 images into an ahistorical maze, stripped of context, labels and narrative. Pushing back, there are those reminding that Arbus’ work arose from long and sustained collaborations with those she photographed, suggesting there is more at stake in Arbus and photography more broadly than a Sontagian critique allows – which Bishara, unlike other viewers of the show, doesn’t seem to see past.

A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art with Orlando Whitfield | Extraordinary Creatives, August 2025

Less what we’re reading and more about what we’re listening to is Ceri Hand’s podcast Extraordinary Creatives. Her vast experience and sensitivity as a host invite guests to share candid reflections and engage in thoughtful conversations about contemporary creative practice. In an episode with Orlando Whitfield, author of All That Glitters, he recounts meeting and befriending Inigo Philbrick at Goldsmiths, University of London, charting the dealer’s meteoric rise and the scheme that became one of the most audacious scandals in art-market history. Through Philbrick’s path – from an internship at White Cube to a network of connections that carried him through various corners of the art world – Whitfield reflects on the possibilities of betrayal in friendship, the breakdowns that ripple through personal and professional relationships, and the bewildering mechanics of value within contemporary art. He also opens up about his own struggles, sharing the moments that drove him away from a field where, in his words, “most artworks have no intrinsic value whatsoever… emotion becomes economics.”

Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images | Ariella Aïsha Azoulay for Doubledummy, July 2025

Anonymous collective, NO-PHOTO, presented a site-specific activation during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, and to mark the occasion, a new edition of Doubledummy’s free newspaper was released, featuring Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images.

Azoulay, whom we also discussed in the previous What We’re Reading, following her interview with ArtReview, writes in this text (first published in Boston Review in 2023): ‘There is no such thing as an image of genocide. But images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of Israel’s battle of images.’ As urgent now as it was then, she goes on to say: ‘The images coming out of Gaza – at least when Israel hasn’t shut down the electricity and Internet – can only falsely be called images, since they capture the people who are calling to stop the genocide in rectangular immaterial forms. These are not discrete images of what has happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognise the decades-long genocide and to stop it now.’

The Rise of Vaporwave Curating | Rahel Aima for Frieze, July 2025

Writing to a malaise that haunts today’s global art exhibitions, Rahel Aima describes a drift toward a vaporwave-inflected curatorial style that cushions political crises in a haze of poetic vagueness and aestheticised melancholy. Its signature is a languid, lyrical framing, a ‘passive voice’ of curation favouring a soothing but hollow affect of community and care that anesthetises political urgency. I’m less convinced of this as a particular ‘style’, or mode, than as a symptom of spaces of suspension where power operates. The task, I think, is not simply to curate with greater ‘stakes,’ but to challenge the conditions that enforce palatability, that render ‘good feelings about bad situations’ comfortably consumable. Perhaps the pressing question, since it is all too true that there exists a ‘dangerous assumption that the art world is inherently progressive, even radical – and that a singular ‘art world’ exists at all,’ is where, and under what circumstances, curation might, if it can, escape these symptoms? ♦

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Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Images:

1-Cover of DAZED MENA Issue 3: Eyes of Truth

2-Covers of Okwui Enwezor Selected Writings, Volume 1. Toward a New African Art Discourse and Okwui Enwezor. Selected Writings, Volume 2. Curating the Postcolonial Condition, edited by Terry Smith, Duke University Press

3-Installation view of Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2023–24, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France © Adrian Deweerdt

4-Ceri Hand: Extraordinary Creatives

5-Cover of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Seeing Genocide: Weaponisation of Images, Doubledummy

6-Screenshot of frieze.com

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Curator Conversations #11 | Alona Pardo: “I have always found the most torturous scenarios the ones from which I learn the most.”

Alona Pardo is a Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, the Barbican Centre London. She has curated and edited several exhibitions and accompanying publications, including most recently: Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020); Trevor Paglen: From Apple to Anomaly (2019); Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (2018); Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds (2018); Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (2018) and Richard Mosse: Incoming (2017), among others.

What is it that attracts you to the exhibition form?

The exhibition form has always held a particular attraction for me because of its inherent multiplicity of form. By that I am referring to the often-lengthy process involved in curating an exhibition, which happens over time and is a process that allows for space to reflect, probe and further refine ideas. I love the process of casting the net wide and researching artists and specific works, playing with different permutations and ultimately allowing a narrative and inherent logic to emerge. It’s a like a huge jigsaw puzzle that you lovingly put together. However, without a doubt the most rewarding aspect of exhibition making is working closely with artists and giving them space for their ideas to coalesce through the exhibition form. Often when I’m working with artists I really see myself as an enabler or facilitator, my role is really to guide them through the spatial complexity of working in the Barbican. Equally rewarding is meeting lenders and experts in the field who are often so generous in imparting their knowledge.

On a more serious note, I believe exhibitions play a vital role – above and beyond retinal pleasure – which is to make manifest ideas through the agency of artistic practice and by extension curatorial practice. Ultimately, I believe curatorial practice has a social function and that this collision between artistic and curatorial practices can activate processes and generate structures that facilitate a dialogical space, a space of negotiation between curators, artists and the public, that hopefully allows for knowledge to form in the curated encounter.

Reflecting on my own experience as a curator, I think it is critical to take into account the space in which I curate – not as an architectural paradigm – but the unique characteristics; in my case, of the Barbican as the largest multi-arts cultural centre in Europe. This very particular dimension informs what we show, how we show it, the connections we make and the curatorial decisions we take, even at a subliminal level. I’m convinced that if I curated shows at the Tate or Hayward they would, by default, take radically different forms, creating other connections perhaps on a more formal or aesthetic level. I would also argue, particularly in my role predominantly as a curator of photography and film, that at the Barbican we have consistently demonstrated our desire to address issues that stretch beyond art and aesthetics, to help us, and by extension the viewer, reflect and understand the world from more complex and nuanced perspectives.

What does it mean to be a curator in an age of image and information excess?

I recently came across a quote by James Baldwin where he says that “artists are here to disturb the peace”. So while it is true that we live in an age where there is a glut of images and information, it strikes me that we need artists more than ever to help distil ideas, visually and conceptually, to pierce through conventional ways of looking at the world and offer us new ways of seeing.

In a recent interview in ArtReview with Catherine Opie, whose work is featured in Masculinities: Liberation through Photography that is alas currently closed due to Covid-19, she says: “Everyone’s asking: aren’t there too many images now, Cathy? Well there’s too much of everything, but it’s how you decide to disseminate that information. That’s what’s interesting to me – this idea of criticality.” And so in this ‘post-truth’ era, I think it is incumbent on artists to make work that questions and overturns received truths and in turn curators need to be supporting artists, whether through newly commissioned work or exhibitions, to bring their work and the ideas embedded in the work, to the attention of as wide an audience as possible.

What is the most invaluable skill required for a curator?

Curating is a shared endeavour and so if I had to highlight one quality above all else it would be a spirit of generosity and collaboration with artists, lenders, estates, peers and colleagues. But there are many other qualities that are essential to be a successful curator: conviction in your ideas and clarity of vision, resilience as, no matter what, you are entering into fraught territory by putting forth a particular position or choosing to give weight to one aspect of an individual’s creative life over another; being both a team leader and a team player; communication coupled with honesty and openness and, last but not least, the ability to compromise, be flexible and listen.

What was your route into curating?

My route into curating was fairly conventional. I studied French and Art History at undergraduate level before embarking on an MA in Curating at Goldsmiths College in the early 2000s at a moment when curatorial practice was undergoing seismic changes and a certain professionalisation. I was fortunate to graduate from Goldsmiths at a time of exponential growth in the museum sector, marked I guess by the inauguration of Tate Modern in 2000. Having had the opportunity to curate shows independently at a time when it seemed access to funding was considerably easier, I was lucky enough to land a job as Assistant Curator at the Barbican a few years later where I’ve been for well over a decade.

What is the most memorable exhibition that you’ve visited?

As a child I remember visiting the Saatchi Gallery at its original location on Boundary Road and coming across the work of Jeff Koons. There were numerous pieces by him on display, but I distinctly remember a piece in which 3 vacuum cleaners encased in Perspex boxes were stacked one on top of the other and being utterly perplexed. The work is Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tipoff), 1985. I don’t know why this encounter left such an indelible mark on me, but it certainly made an impression and from that moment on, and being a precocious child, I knew I wanted to understand what it meant. I think that experience was incredibly formative.

However, in terms of ambition and scope, Okwui Enwezor’s documenta11, 2002 certainly tops the bill, for me at least, as the most impactful and meaningful exhibition experience. It felt radical in the way it directly addressed socio-political issues of globalisation and advanced a narrative of decolonisation, both artistically and historically, that I feel has genuinely impacted on both artistic and curatorial practice.

What constitutes curatorial responsibility in the context within which you work?

A curator bears a responsibility towards the work they show and the artists they work with, to the institution they work in as well as to the public. It is a complex triangulation!

On a personal level, I believe curators have a responsibility in giving a voice or platform to those who have been marginalised within the art historical canon, be that women artists whose work has been overlooked, such as Dorothea Lange or indeed Vanessa Winship, a British artist who had been overlooked in her home country but equally to artists of colour or queer-identifying artists in order to relocate them in art history. A curatorial platform for advocacy and activism is a great responsibility, and one no curator takes lightly.

What is the one myth that you would like to dispel around being a curator?

“Pity the beleaguered museum curator. Mired in administration, fighting scholarly turf wars, courting egomaniacal benefactors and collectors, and attempting to infuse critical heft into the next blockbuster show, how does she find time to respond to the reconstitution of her profession as an art form open to every gifted flaneur with a knack for designing brochures?” Michael J. Kowalski, The Curatorial Muse (2010). I think that says it all!

What advice would you give to aspiring curators?

To be confident in your opinions, to look critically at the world, visit as many exhibitions as possible, engage with current debates around artistic practice; and, most importantly, to independently curate in all sorts of venues, organise talks or write reviews etc (even if only for your own pleasure). It’s all about gaining experience and confronting new scenarios from which we learn more about ourselves. I have always found the most torturous scenarios the ones from which I learn the most!♦

Further interviews in the Curator Conversations series can be read here.

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Curator Conversations is part of a collaborative set of activities on photography curation and scholarship initiated by Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University), Christopher Stewart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) and Esther Teichmann (Royal College of Art) that has included the symposium, Encounters: Photography and Curation, in 2018 and a ten week course, Photography and Curation, hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2018-19.

Images:

1-Alona Pardo