The Far-off Elsewhere

In 2001, late Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor’s landmark exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 opened at the Villa Stuck in Munich. The exhibition, which traveled to MCA Chicago in late 2001 and to New York’s MoMA PS1 in 2002, examined art-making set against the backdrop of liberation struggles across the African continent in the mid-20th century. Drawing out the political and philosophical threads that emerged concurrent with these struggles, the exhibition and accompanying book unpack the movements’ complex, sometimes contentious relationships with modernity—wrenching them from the Western imperialist visions that had long defined, and curtailed, the continent’s relationship to its past and present. Just four months after the opening of The Short Century, Documenta11, for which Enwezor was artistic director, followed suit. “From the outset, the project of Documenta11 was conceived not as an exhibition but as a constellation of public spheres,”¹ Enwezor wrote in the catalogue introduction. The exhibition in Kassel was conceived as various “Platforms” held from 2001 through 2002, across four continents: Europe (Vienna and Berlin), Asia (New Delhi), the Americas (St. Lucia), and Africa (Lagos). The conversations and symposia held within each of the platforms informed the fifth and final platform in Kassel.

Much has been written about the 11th edition of Documenta, and more will be written still, particularly in the context of 2001—a year of turnovers and turning points in conversations on globalization, spurred on by neoliberal economic shifts, a new wave of imperialism, and indefinite occupation under the pretense of state security. The long conversation around Enwezor’s exhibition is, in many ways, in keeping with his assertion that its ideological framework resists closure. The “constellation of public spheres” elides easy conclusions that would produce a clean, institutional narrative of the critical positions from which contemporary art is made. Writing in his introduction to The Short Century, Enwezor describes his curatorial endeavor as “an attempt to construct a contemporary ‘critical biography’ of Africa,” asking “what lies at the heart of modernity itself out of the ruins of colonialism.” Following this thread, we might presently ask what modes of (re)presentational ethics are possible when not conceived as secondary, supplemental, or by proxy?

The Short Century was framed by the years 1945 and 1994, representing “the beginning and end” of Africa’s struggle for independence. In 1945, the 5th Pan-African Congress—first organized in 1900 by Trinidadian barrister Henry Williams—convened in Manchester, England, and focused on an intensified, unified effort toward self-determinacy for African nations. Arguably, the Congress popularized the term Pan-Africanism, although the philosophy itself dates back much further. In 1994, South Africa adopted its post-apartheid constitution, marked by Nelson Mandela’s election as president that April. Pan-Africanism mobilized amid these pivotal moments, in addition to small, organized revolts, and key cultural convenings, such as the Asian-African Bandung Conference in 1955, which partially laid the foundation for the eventual Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.

In the past two years, several exhibitions have been presented across the United States² in response to ideas embedded within Pan-Africanism. One exhibition, in particular—Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, held at the Art Institute of Chicago [December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025]³—was organized as a rejoinder to Enwezor’s constellation, refusing a single unifying vision of African and diasporic artmaking.

Project a Black Planet gathered nearly 350 objects by artists working across Africa, North and South America, and Europe, many of them seen together for the first time. Curated by Antawan I. Byrd, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the exhibition cites The Short Century as its “most imposing precedent.” As Getachew writes in the catalogue—a dense, nearly 400-page tome that accompanies and expands upon the exhibition—“Pan-African projects of self-magnification reorganized empire’s spatial and temporal arrangements to produce new projections of the self and the world.”⁴ The exhibition comprised three sections exploring key themes of Pan-Africanism. Garveyism: the 1910s/20s movement toward global Black solidarity that situated Africa as the world of the future and a site of return (if not physically, then mentally, spiritually, and ideologically). Négritude: founded in the 1930s by Aimé Césaire; Paulette and Jeanne Nardal; Léopold Sédar Senghor; Léon Damas; and other ethnically fractured Francophone African and Caribbean students, writers, and philosophers living in Paris, who were engaging in systemic critique of French colonialism some 20 years before African nations gained their independence from that old regime. And Quilombismo (from kilumbo, “war camp”): a liberation-based philosophy formalized by Brazilian scholar and playwright Abdias do Nascimento in 1980.

The show opened with a sort of prelude: two monumental figures flanked the gallery’s grand entrance: Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s Tree Woman (2016), a human-plant chimera with fleshlike roots; and Brazilian artist Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos’ Oxóssi (1960), which references a Yoruba figure who appears in Brazilian and Caribbean folklore and is associated with hunting, forests, and food. The next room was lined with reproductions of Hale Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro mural cycle (1950–1951), a sweeping global narrative of African art and cultural history in the Americas. Awol Erizku’s glimmering bust Nefertiti – Miles Davis (Gold) was suspended from the ceiling.

The next gallery⁵ was dominated by the iconic red, green, and black Pan-African flag, created by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) around 1920. Songs from the 1973 Roy Ayers Ubiquity album Red Black & Green echoed throughout the space. Two tricolored flags—David Hammons’ African American Flag (1990) and Chris Ofili’s Union Black (2003)—hung side by side, positioned directly opposite Edith Dekyndt’s video Ombre Indigène (Native Shadow) (2014). The video features a flag, made of black hair, planted in Martinique at the site of a fatal 1830 shipwreck that took the lives of hundreds of illegally enslaved Africans on board. A collaged portrait by Lubaina Himid captures Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture (1987) in military dress embedded with fragments of newspaper clippings detailing anti-Black violence in Britain during the 1980s.

The adjacent room opened the exhibition’s chapter on Garveyism. Just past the entrance, Yto Barrada’s Tectonic Plate (2010) and Mwangi Hutter’s Static Drift (2001) reimagine existing cartographies of the African continent—a practice of mapping, or re-mapping, as anti-colonial tool. Some works bring the likeness of Garvey himself into the frame itself, including James van Der Zee’s photographs documenting the 1926 UNIA International Convention in Harlem, alongside his portrait of Garvey, Kojo Tovalou-Houénou of the Royal Family of Dahomey (modern day Benin), and George Marke seated in casual conversation (1924). Tavares Strachan’s Kojo (2021) collages a portrait of the Dahomey prince with a 1972 issue of Jet magazine.

The exhibition then turned to Négritude, placing its artistic and cultural progression into conversation with the Harlem Renaissance in the US and surrealism in France. Wifredo Lam’s study for his monumental 1943 painting La Jungla (recently on view in the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), as with much of Lam’s work, sits somewhat uncomfortably in any one category of the exhibition, as it combines stylistic elements of his earlier works in cubism and surrealism with allusions to Afro-Caribbean and Yoruba spirituality and ecology—iconographies that emerged after his departure from occupied France, back to his native Cuba, in 1941. The painting’s central figure directly reflects this hybridity—twisting and contorting in multiple directions, while its distinct, masklike visage directly confronts the viewer’s gaze.

Writing in his essay “The Short Century,” Enwezor observed “Négritude, facing the example of African-American writers of the Harlem Renaissance during the Jazz age … posited a conscious intellectual dramatization of African alterity, and insisted on the reality and originality of an African culture in the making of modernity.” Négritude, as a modernist construct, forms an ethos based on “the primacy of African subjectivity” as a contradiction to “colonial alienation.” Frantz Fanon examined this sense of alienation from a psychiatric standpoint,⁶ delineating how the colonized body’s culture and history are stripped away, while another, that of the colonist, is assumed. Scholar V.Y. Mudimbe elaborates on this process further: “The alienation caused by colonialism constitutes the thesis, the African ideologies of otherness (black personality and Negritude) the antithesis, and political liberation the synthesis.”⁷ In the way so-called primitivism asserts white superiority and authority, négritude confronts that assumption while still embedding itself within a modernist tradition, and, in fact, reifying that very modernism through anti-racist positioning.

Project a Black Planet’s third section on quilombismo reflected a distinct approach to Pan-Africanism, one informed by the Portuguese trade of enslaved peoples from Central Africa as well as Brazil’s abolitionist movement. Writing in 1980, in exile during Brazil’s military dictatorship, quilombismo’s founder Abdias do Nascimento defined the concept as “a practice of liberation and assuming the command to one’s own history.” Quilombismo is, at its core, a proposal toward self-governance through community reliance. Nascimento’s painting in the show, Simbiose Africana No. 3, depicts an ouroboros set against the tricolor Pan-African flag, combining two symbols of unification. Co-curator Matthew S. Witkovsky observes, in the catalogue: “Beyond the stance of revolt and resistance, what the quilombos modeled for Nascimento was the elaboration of a functional society. They showed in effect that the institutionalization of inherited customs or rituals—survivals from the past—could enable self-governance in the present.”⁸

Quilombismo can also be defined as a form of self-sufficiency among communities continuously met with systemic neglect and oppression. Two works in particular linger on the longing of the queer gaze. Guyanese British artist Ingrid Pollard captures the creative and professional lives of Black women in a suite of black-and-white photographs from the 1990 book Passion. In South African artist Nicholas Hlobo’s 2006 sculpture Ndiyafuna (“I want” or “I need” in Zulu), a figure plunges into an amorphous bag, leaving only the lower body visible, suggesting an anonymous sexual encounter or a space of safety in the face of invisibilized desire. The exhibition ends with a coda—with works exploring Blackness as a social and historical construct, and winding vitrines containing books and periodicals illustrate how Pan-African ideas circulated in print and popular media from 1900 to the present.

Other recent exhibitions have taken up the mantle of Pan-African ideologies. From December 2024 to July 2025, the Los Angeles County of American Art presented the 60-artist exhibition Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Curated by Dhyandra Lawson, the show featured artists living and working across Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and predominantly drew upon works from the museum’s collection.⁹ The show was divided into four sections: “Speech Silence,” “Movement Transformation,” “Imagination,” and “Representation.” The first, “Speech Silence,” interrogated forms of silence and opacity in language, opening with Glenn Ligon’s spectral film The Death of Tom (2008), which centers on a scene from the 1903 silent adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In the original film, Tom is mortally wounded by his captor; as he lies dying, he sees visions of an angel annunciating the end of the American Civil War through a sequence of illustrated vignettes. When processing the footage of his re-creation, according to Ligon, the imagery came out blurry, resulting in the final cut capturing ghostly afterimages of the re-enactment, while a song, performed by jazz pianist Jason Moran and based on the vaudeville standard “Nobody,” plays in the background.

Other works in this section—Sanford Biggers’ Witness and Adam Pendleton’s Our Ideas #4, for instance—similarly evoke silence through acts of erasure and absence. From a distance, Tariku Shiferaw’s structural paintings recall minimalist color field compositions, but works such as Water No Get Enemy (Fela Kuti), incorporating metallic strips laid against a black and blue background toy with fields of lenticular transparency and opacity, demanding close looking.

In the next gallery, the section “Movement Transformation” considered the conditions of forced migration. One of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits (2022) stood on a raised platform at the center of the room; the series was first conceived as a protective layer following the police beating of Rodney King in 1992. Nearby stood cameron clayborn’s homegrown #3 (2021), an attenuated structure of hair beads, insulation, paper, and stucco. In Yinka Shonibare’s Headless Man Trying to Drink (2005), a life-size decapitated figure wearing a Dutch wax–printed suit hovers above a drinking fountain. The material of the suit, a remnant of Dutch colonization in West Africa, and the figure’s futile action, gesture to a postcolonial reality—the ostensible presence of resources that are impossible to access. Documentation of Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo’s 2017 Venice Biennale performance, Dibujo Intercontinental, shows the artist tethered, by the waist, to an empty boat, which she drags behind her as a visceral reminder of histories of migration and extractive labor connecting both African and Chinese diasporas in Cuba. 

“Imagination” purported to interpret diasporic themes through abstraction. Some works, such as Sandra Brewster’s monumental Blur (2020), still incorporate bodily apparitions. The photographic transfer reflects a liminal space of being, or a kind of fugitivity that negates prescriptive notions of identity, fixity, belonging. Others touch on the relationship between the land and body, as with Lorna Simpson’s Detached Night (2019), in which a mountainous landscape morphs and drips into contours resembling a human form, a shapeless and borderless diasporic terrain.  

The final section, “Representation,” examined photography’s history as both a tool of colonial capture and a means of self-actualization. Nona Faustine’s Maison des Esclaves, Door of No Return, Descendant Daughter Returns (2020), was created on Gorée Island while the artist was living in nearby Dakar. Faustine, who passed in 2025, left behind a body of self-portraiture that pays tribute to Black histories of departure, diaspora, and return. The title and location reference Gorée’s infamous narrow passageway that leads to the vast Atlantic Ocean; it is said to be the final point of departure for enslaved individuals taken through the largest trading center on the African coast from the 15th century to the late 19th century. In the photograph, the viewer sees Faustine, draped in a long-flowing gold garment, defiant and resplendent, her back turned to the dark passageway, a shimmering emblem of return. 

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination—organized by Oluremi C. Onabanjo at the Museum of Modern Art [December 2025–July 2026]—features photographers working in West and Central Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s, a dual moment of growing national consciousness and transnational solidarities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now [November 2024–February 2025], organized by Akili Tommasino, experimentally explored how Black artists and creatives have taken inspiration from Ancient Egypt across visual art, literature, performance, theater, and film. The latter show succeeded in challenging the predominantly Eurocentric gaze that has defined much of Egyptology, though fell short interrogating the tensions between Western understandings of Blackness and Egypt, particularly how this interrelationship tends to omit Arabness, an argument that could also generally be made about Pan-Africanism. But this critique may be somewhat counterproductive to what the Pan-African ethos aims to accomplish. Not to pit us against ourselves through difference, but to create a shared aesthetic language rooted in the long middle of liberation struggles. 

In 2015, Enwezor became the first curator of African descent to organize the Venice Biennale, which he aptly titled All the World’s Futures. In his introduction for the catalogue, he writes: 

Regardless of where in the world one lives, every waking hour is saturated with terrible news from elsewhere …. Not a single hour passes without residents, from somewhere in the far-off elsewhere, being confronted by the golems and phantoms of disarray and disorder. It is as if the entire global society … exists in the long, interminable insomnia of rulers, and the endless days of vigil kept by protesters and citizens. Sordid governmentalities and shredded social relations keep rulers and the ruled on a permanent state of alert, a form of wakefulness that tortures the imagination, numbs the mind, scars the body. In this realm of dissolution the global landscape is jittery with apparitions.¹⁰

The phantoms of the “far-off elsewhere” are as present now as they were then, as the terrible news feels far away yet very near, inextricably connected to how we situate collective struggles within global and local contexts. Oftentimes, what’s not questioned in the conversation on Pan-Africanism is what’s lost in this panoptic vision of Black experience. How do we maintain the specificity of the local within global solidarity struggles? How do you build a global resistance movement through such a nebulous construct, through a poetic conception that, at its best, instills a shared sense of history but, at its worst, fails to acknowledge the economical, ecological disparities with which we take up liberation struggles on a local scale? 

In October 2025, American artist Cameron Rowland’s work Replacement was removed from the façade of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The installation was part of the group exhibition ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought, curated by Naomi Beckwith, which examined the “history of the transatlantic circulation of forms and ideas.” For many artists and writers in the show, this subtext (perhaps more so than the context) encompassed creative practices wrought by the transatlantic trade of enslaved peoples and the felt experiences of resultant diasporas. Replacement signified a replica of the flag of Martinique—a tri-colored red, green, and black emblem first adopted in 2023. Martinique has been a part of France since it was colonized in 1635, and the tri-colors—according to the artwork caption, which forms the second part of the work—have been associated with Black resistance movements on the island since at least 1665. 

The flag was removed from view just a day after the exhibition opened. In response, Rowland’s gallery, Maxwell Graham, said in an Instagram post, “Palais de Tokyo has determined that Cameron Rowland’s artwork Replacement could be considered illegal. As a result, it is no longer included in the exhibition.” A spokesperson for the Palais de Tokyo told Hyperallergic that nearly a month prior, the museum received a memo from the office of the French Secretary General of the Ministry of the Interior. Described in Hyperallergic, “The memo reiterated the ‘principle of neutrality’ of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, which prohibits the display on public buildings of ‘symbols representing the advocacy of political, religious, or philosophical opinions.’”¹² The institution never elaborated on the perceived illegality of the flag, but the conflation of liberatory symbols—of the Pan-African flag, of the Palestinian flag, a worldwide symbol for anticolonial resistance and recognition—is all but apparent. Rowland’s Replacement reifies the soft power of statist attitudes toward imperial symbols while also bringing a possible manifestation of decolonial futurity into an artistic commons. The work speaks to familiar associations we hold with national symbologies, but reveals a deeper truth at the heart of state mythologies: If the construction of nationalism is based on a mutually agreed upon set of symbols and circumstances, then the very symbols of that ideology can be recalibrated to transfigure the colonial logic of empire.  

Responding to the question of (re)presentational ethics, the exhibitions and artworks highlighted here constitute a cross-section of subject matters, temporalities, and geographies that again call Enwezor’s “constellation of public spheres” to mind. He returned to this concept in his 2003 essay “The Postcolonial Constellation,” writing: “Contemporary art today is refracted, not just from the specific site of culture and history but in a more critical sense, from the standpoint of a complex geopolitical configuration that defines all systems of production and relations of exchange as a consequence of globalization after imperialism.”¹³ A flaw with Pan-Africanism, at least as a curatorial and artistic framework within contemporary visual discourse, is that it can easily elide the complexities embedded within the movements it emerged from—its focus on Black Africanness, for instance, or the absenting of political, economic, or infrastructural disparities across geopolitical lines.¹⁴ These exhibitions support that ambiguity, pointing toward Pan-Africanism as a boundless, borderless construct that informs a worldview through a transcontinental lens, perhaps more so when infrastructural disparity is acknowledged as a shared part of the struggle.   

I’m reminded of Koyo Kouoh and her curatorial essay for the Venice Biennale, penned before her passing in 2025. She intersects excerpts of writings by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, rooting the work of exhibition making in Pan-African Black study. This worldview emerges only through context, or relation, in a Glissantian sense. Narratives of displacement and dispersal become evident as artists are put into dialogue with one another. Likewise, as our ideas of borders shift, so, too, must our notion of the Pan-African. 

“Look at the creole garden … In the great Circle, everything is in everything else.” 

***

This text was supported by a travel grant from The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. 

Re’al Christian is a writer, critic, and art historian based in New York. Her criticism, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor. She has written texts for catalogues and anthologies including Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home (Monacelli Press / Prospect New Orleans), And ever an edge (Studio Museum in Harlem), Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument), and On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016–2021 (Gregory R. Miller & Co.), among others. Christian received her MA in Art History from Hunter College. She holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication.