Sharjah Biennial 2021 to Host Posthumous Okwui Enwezor Exhibition

The Sharjah Biennial 2021, its fifteenth edition running from March to June 2021, will feature a posthumous exhibition curated from the notes of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), the influential Nigerian curator who died at 55 after a battle with cancer. Titled "Postcolonial," the show is a sequel to Enwezor's acclaimed "Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965" (2016–17) at Munich's Haus der Kunst, which he directed from 2011 to 2018. Hoor al-Qasimi, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, is realizing Enwezor's detailed project with a team including Nigerian art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu, German curator Ute Meta Bauer, Egyptian curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh, and Sudanese writer Salah M. Hassan. Al-Qasimi told the New York Times that Enwezor's Documenta—where he became the first non-European to direct the quinquennial in 1998—was a major inspiration. The exhibition aligns with the biennial's theme "Thinking Historically in the Present," aiming to connect past and future. Enwezor described it as "a module for addressing the disruptive power of artistic monolingualism but also a horizon of possibility for conceiving a theoretical space to think historically in the present." The artist list and other shows remain unannounced, but past editions featured large commissions, public art, performances, and film programs.