| Summary: | In "Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale" (1997), the first large biennial that he would direct in the course of an extraordinary career of curatorial experimentation, curator Okwui Enwezor presciently selected art that explored themes of migration, cultural traffic, and sites of crisis. This essay by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green explains that his biennial occurred at precisely such a moment of crisis in postapartheid South Africa, when attention from the restlessly moving international art world biennial circuit meant little to local audiences, who were struggling with ongoing inequalities, economic hardships, financial uncertainties and constant change in the municipal power structures, which eventually lead to a shut-down of the Biennale before its scheduled end. Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of "Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art" (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a time of crisis, caught in frictions between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, encountering South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local reception. Even at the distance of that radically different time and space, the critical reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale foreshadowed the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism, for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the needs of the local scene enough. While the authors reject that comparison, it is newly important to understand the nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era where nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the dream of a postnational world moves out of reach. In times like these, the authors conclude, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves one year after that exceptional curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories, opening up new opportunities and elaborating a new reality yet to come.
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