Log Book Entry Before Storm 2014, an installation piece by Raqs Media Collective, an art group based in New Delhi whose members spent time with Okwui Enwezor as he grapple with cancer. Image: Raqs Media Collective

Rags Media Collective based in Delhi tells the touching story of their relationship with Okwui Enwezor as he struggled with cancer.

BY KAZAD

Okwui Enwezor’s death on March 15, 2019, after a battle with cancer, continues to have a significant impact on the art community, especially his friends and colleagues.  Although a lot has been said about how he confronted cancer and the treatment, very few people know about how he suffered and strove to curate new shows despite his ailment. Okwui
Enwezor did not let cancer stop him. Even as he went through cancer treatment, he continued traveling across continents, speaking with artists and looking at new works.

The Rags Media Collective is just one of the many art groups he encountered in his travels.  Made up of the trio of Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the collective had the firsthand experience of Okwui as he confronted the challenges posed by cancer even as he followed his passion of creating new shows.

Rags Media Collective is based in Delhi. Although the collective resides within parameters of art, their work transcends art.  Using videos, high-tech objects, installations, and online projects, the trio critiques globalization in ways that are attention-grabbing. In this amazing account, the collective talks about the relationship with Okwui and the kind of man he was. The collective details a firsthand account of the curator’s struggle as cancer took a stronghold.  This is their story.

Raqs Media Collective’s touching story of friendship with Okwui Enwezor

By Raqs Media Collective:

Suddenly, in the middle of a New Delhi summer, a phone call. Not from a number that we knew before. But the voice, a warm baritone, which always began with a chuckle and then grew to fill the space of continents with a laugh, was, unmistakably, Okwui Enwezor.

“Raqs Media Collective, we need to remember the October Revolution, it’s now a hundred years. Let’s approach it from a tangent, make fresh inroads, let hidden dimensions surface. Come to Munich in November.” Okwui’s was a voice that required our singular attention, ever since the twenty-first century began.

Once, in the wake of one of his visits to Delhi, while he was on his way to spend a few restful days in Kerala in 2014, we laughed together about how finally, at least one aspect of his vivid life could be described as a journey from Calabar to Malabar. Calabar, the city on the Nigerian Atlantic coast where he was born, and Malabar, where he was headed, from Delhi. It was the kind of rhyming joke that appealed to Okwui. It connected continents and centuries, it tangled histories, it made the world seem expansive and homely, almost intimate, at the same time. During this visit, we went together to see a graveyard of imperial power—the dereliction of “Coronation Park,” at the northern edge of Delhi—and we found ourselves reflecting on the strange twists and turns of global history that tied experiences and reflections across continents. While walking in the shadow of dead emperors and frozen viceroys, we discussed the fact that the deepest secret of all claims to power was hubris.

In November 2017 we, along with the artists and poets we had gathered, reached Munich, to think together about the centenary of the events of 1917. His illness had deepened. He was unable to attend the events. On one of those evenings, our dear friend Louise Neri asked us to carry homemade food to him. Kale salad and green prawn curry. She knew that he would not eat much, but that he would definitely inquire about the recipes. Okwui’s house in Munich, where this meal was prepared, was rich with books scattered all around, bearing witness to the immense range of his curiosities. A short taxi ride away, across a few corridors, and we were now in his hospital room.

The meal was indeed kept aside, but notes on recipes registered, and a discussion started which continued for the next couple of hours. From his hospital bed, he began scaling out ideas for the reactivation of the idea of the Museum. His questions were simply stated. What is the relevance of the museum today, after the scrambling of canons? What kind of generative force can a museum occupy?

The museum—and its temporary expression, the exhibition—appealed to him, remaining as intersecting platforms, as sites where unrealized historical propositions were to be rehearsed and activated. We had met him for the first time at one of these platforms: May 2001, the Delhi Platform of Documenta 11. He was always present, debating, wearing white cotton kurtas. He loved white kurtas. They suited him. The Documenta platforms were his idea of “rehearsals for the repositioning of sites of discourse production.” In the hospital in Munich, on that November evening, he returned to the idea of the Platform. Now, he said, it has to do much more. It has to remain nomadic, dispersed, searching, and yet have a stable location, to gather and be the point of dispersal. It has to be hospitable to the untested and uncharted present, and alert to incipient energies. He knew that it would be tough for such an imagination to be articulated institutionally. But that was him. Always testing his own ideas.

He struggled to become comfortable in his hospital bed. A wide-ranging conversation ensued about how to detour away from the grip of the national in the postwar imaginations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. What gestures, personas, events to draw in. What kinds of lines to draw.

 What new sources to work with. It was as if he was inviting everyone, present and absent, to think together again, and along a fresh path. We shared with him our hologram of the sovereign’s empty robe, a ghost that had haunted us ever since our visit with him to Coronation Park in Delhi. We had been developing the hologram in the wake of our work, upon his invitation, at the Venice Biennale. He was entranced by the disappearing act of a viceregal robe turning into digital dust.

He was very ill. His bones ached. His body was slowly dismantling from within. He described it and, along with it, the various regimes of treatment. He inquired about our friend who was diagnosed at the same time as him with the same illness. He liked details. Even the smallest ones. Even the shift of a few points in test results held his attention. We talked about when to meet next and what provisions to gather for the new intellectual journeys. And then, Louise gently reminded him of the need to rest.

We are writing this in Doha. History, and her friend, Serendipity, have brought Okwui Enwezor into our conversations repeatedly over the past few days. We are with Abdellah Karroum, and with Ranjit Hoskote. All of us, in very specific and unique ways, have been touched by the legacy of Okwui Enwezor, and every conversation between us in the past few days has had a moment of speech, silence, wonderment, or laughter at the way in which Okwui lived, worked, and encountered the world. On Friday, the night of March 15, somewhere between land and sea, off the coast of Doha and so very close to the full moon, Abdellah looked at the sky and said, let us take a photo together, with him behind us. The moon hung large in the sky. Farewell dear friend, and thank you for making the world always more intoxicating, always more challenging.

He was very ill. His bones ached. His body was slowly dismantling from within. He described it and, along with it, the various regimes of treatment. He inquired about our friend who was diagnosed at the same time as him with the same illness. He liked details.

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