Extraordinarily warm-hearted, bursting with energy, always entertaining, Okwui was full of life, and it is hard to accept that he is no longer with us. It breaks my heart to think that he was denied the joy of raising his daughter, who will grow up without her father. And his untimely death puts a sudden end to a stellar career as a curator of groundbreaking exhibitions. From his unforgettable Documenta 11 (2002) with its “platforms,” which were deliberately not held in Kassel, to the superb “Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2016–17), which spun art as a global history, it has always struck me as the defining strength of his projects that they drew direct connections between art history and the world at large. This decidedly political take on his field let him repudiate widely accepted dichotomies, such as distinctions between apparently Western and purportedly indigenous art, or between postcolonial and modernist narratives.

In Okwui Enwezor, the world has lost a brilliant curator and influential interpreter of our contemporary situation. The task of reviewing his work and paying tribute to his achievements is best left to those of my fellow eulogists who were his companions for longer stretches of his journey. I had the privilege of being his close associate for seven precious years, during which a professional relationship blossomed into friendship – a gift for which I feel deep gratitude.

It is not easy to explain in just a few sentences the significance of the loss of Okwui Enwezor. Certainly not for me personally. It is a fact I cannot internalize even now, more than a month after his much-too-early death. While his loss touches so many of the people he worked with over the last 30 years, more than anything, it is his uncompromising political voice that will be missed.

I had the great fortune and privilege to work with Okwui for almost 20 years in a number of different roles. He told me that we first met at the “Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997” exhibition. What I know for certain is that in July 1999, Rob Reynolds had the idea of doing an interview with Okwui for Feed. The interview took place a few days later, on August 4, 1999, at Thread Waxing Space in New York. As I remembered it, this was my first professional encounter with Okwui, who had been announced a year earlier as the artistic director of Documenta.

Holding back seems like a throwback today, but there is nothing old or stymied about the innocent inventiveness of Robert Ryman’s painting. The loss of this important postwar figure was registered more quietly than some of us expected; but that is perhaps a fitting tribute to how Ryman lived, and painted. Beginnings were ends, and finding a point of departure appeared to be more important than hurried conclusions. In other words, painting, for Ryman, was a life’s work. Suzanne Hudson, a foremost expert on Ryman, weighs in on how so little, materially speaking, says so much.

In her texts, lecture-performances, and film-collaborations, Denise Ferreira da Silva has opposed figures of thought and modes of action that are authorized by and thus ongoingly constitutive of a genealogy of Enlightenment and Western modernist thinking. In her 2007 book "Toward A Global Idea of Race", it is the “transparent I” of enlightened subjectivity that comes under attack. Though this “transparent I” has itself been criticized, especially in continental philosophies and feminist writings throughout the 20th century, Ferreira da Silva makes the claim that those criticisms hardly touched the systemic function this concept carries for racial subjugation, and that they remain insufficiently radical in their rejections. Professor Ferreira da Silva here illuminates these and other issues in conversation with the art historians/critics Kerstin Stakemeier and Susanne Leeb.

So much in today’s filmic landscape would be unthinkable without the work of Barbara Hammer,  a pioneer of the medium’s technical forms as well as its subjects. The bodies we see in a Hammer piece are never disconnected from how we see them. As we mourn the passing of this singular figure, Ada Maria Hennel offers a look back at the distance that Hammer measured for us from the void that still remains to be filled.