Okwui Enwezor’s essay argues that contemporary art must be understood through a postcolonial constellation: a geopolitical field shaped by globalization after imperialism, where culture, subjectivity, migration, institutions, and power are permanently in transition. Against the idea that Western Modernism offers a universal artistic standard, Enwezor insists that contemporary art emerges from entangled histories of colonialism, decolonization, diaspora, creolization, and transcultural exchange. He criticises museums and curatorial systems that claim openness while reproducing older hierarchies between centre and margin, modern and primitive, art and ethnographic evidence. His central case study is Tate Modern’s display of the nude, action, and body, where African bodies appear through colonial ethnographic films while artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode are excluded. This arrangement, for Enwezor, repeats the museum’s primitivist logic: African visual culture is treated as raw material for European Modernism rather than as an autonomous, self-reflexive modernity. The essay therefore exposes how exhibitions shape art history, not merely by showing objects, but by authorising memory, value, and visibility. Enwezor concludes that contemporary art cannot be contained by singular modernist narratives; it requires curatorial models attentive to multiplicity, discontinuity, postcolonial critique, and the unstable geographies of global cultural production.