Translating Okwui Enwezor’s seminal 2002 exhibition The Short Century into a fellowship programme
From June to November 2025, The Short Century Intensive jointly presented by Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) brought together U.S. fellows Pujan Karambeigi, Miatta Kawinzi, sadé powell, Cosmo Whyte, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson to explore the compressed 20th century as a formative, in-between space. Across artistic registers, they engaged with archives, excavated overlooked genealogies, and rehearsed speculative modes of citation and annotation, tracing new networks, collaborations, and Afro-diasporic relations. The intensive reimagined and activated Enwezor’s 2001–2002 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, raising key questions: What becomes possible when African political and aesthetic thought is taken on its own terms—not as an extension, supplement, or proxy? And how might new forms of relation across geographies arise from a shared commitment to difference, rather than a desire to collapse it?
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