Press room

• Artists new to Barbican’s iteration include Ronald Moody, William Kentridge, Mohamed Melehi, Farid Belkahia, Rubem Valentim, alongside a distinct selection of works from Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Everlyn Nicodemus, Papa Ibra Tall, Dumile Feni, Gerard Sekoto, Wifredo Lam, Bertina Lopes, Malangatana Ngwenya and Benedict Enwonwu, offering a renewed perspective on the exhibition’s themes 
• A new body of paintings and drawings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye forms the final room of the exhibition, where, drawing on her own lived experience, the artist meditates on the impact of Pan-Africanism in generations of communities like hers
• Exhibition inspires major season of over 50 events across art, cinema, music, performance, talks and more at the Barbican, with collaborators including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jamz Supernova, Moses Boyd, Coby Sey, Sammy Baloji, Busayo Twins and The Africa Centre

Opening tomorrow, the Barbican presents Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major international exhibition examining the influence of Pan-Africanism on artistic and cultural production. The undertaking, a highlight of the Barbican’s Summer season, reaches beyond the exhibition itself to encompass a Centre-wide programme of more than fifty events across art, cinema, music, performance, talks, and more, bringing together artists, thinkers, and communities from across the African continent and its global diasporas. 

While Pan-Africanism has long been recognised as a galvanising force in twentieth-century sociopolitical history, Project a Black Planet is the first major international exhibition to consider both its impact on visual art and culture, and the critical role of artists in shaping Pan-African visions. Spanning over a century to the present day, the exhibition brings together around 300 works – ranging from paintings and installations to posters, journals, and film – produced across Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe. 

Participating artists include El Anatsui, Fatma Arargi, Christopher Cozier, Liz Johnson Artur, Kader Attia, Farid Belkahia, Marlene Dumas, Inji Efflatoun, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Benedict Enwonwu, Dumile Feni, Samuel Fosso, Coco Fusco, Abd al-Hadi el-Gazzar, Sonia Gomes, David Hammons, Lubaina Himid, Nicholas Hlobo, Claudette Johnson, William Kentridge, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Bertina Lopes, Ernest Mancoba, Sabelo Mlangeni, Ronald Moody, Azikiwe Mohammed, Kawira Mwirichia, Abdias do Nascimento, Iba N’Diaye, Grace Ndiritu, Malangatana Ngwenya, Everlyn Nicodemus, Magdalene Odundo, Chris Ofili, Colette Omogbai, Ingrid Pollard, Samir Rafi, Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Gerard Sekoto, Cauleen Smith, Tavares Strachan, Papa Ibra Tall, The Otolith Group and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.  

Exhibition Overview:

Coined around 1900, Pan-Africanism can be understood as an umbrella term for political and philosophical movements advocating for self-determination, anti-colonial resistance, and transnational solidarity among peoples of African descent. In Project a Black Planet, Panafrica, the symbolic site invoked in the title, appears not as a fixed territory but as a conceptual terrain where rupture, dissent, and collective imagination converge toward emancipatory futures. Instead of mapping a defined geography, the exhibition casts Panafrica as a shifting constellation that reimagines standard representations of the planet. 

Project a Black Planet showcases how artists and cultural producers responded to world-affecting histories of conflict and rupture, acting on desires for unity and solidarity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing a vast range of cultural outputs into conversation, the exhibition presents works by academically trained and self-taught artists, popular music and avant-garde experiments, political and poetic speech and printed materials and ephemera, from posters and magazines to pamphlets and newspapers, all of which formed a key role in the distribution and formation of Pan Africanist ideas. 

While Pan-Africanism aspires to transnational solidarity and an overarching consensus, the exhibition also articulates diverse experiences and dissenting trajectories. Starting in the Upper Galleries, works ranging from painting and sculpture to film expand upon pivotal movements that have shaped the history of Pan-Africanism. These include Garveyism, Marcus Garvey’s projection of a symbolic return to Africa and the creation of a parallel Black world grounded in autonomy, dignity, and political equality; Quilombismo,a philosophy of resistance centred on self-determination and Indigenous knowledges; and Négritude, a movement arguing for the centrality to universalist modernism of African art and culture and Afro-Caribbean intellectual tradition. 

Large-scale installations in the Lower Galleries reflect and build on these guiding ideas to bring into focus further themes that include protest and memory, subjectivity and interiority. Artworks created in response to specific post-independence, revolutionary contexts across the African continent and the wider Atlantic world are assembled in chorus, reflecting the intertwined histories in Pan-Africanism of political struggle and cultural expression. A further section considers ancestry and homage, reflecting how Pan-Africanism has drawn strength from intergenerational ties and collective remembrance. 

As the exhibition draws to a close, visitors are invited to delve into a range of connections between physical interiors and psychological interiority. In this context, the private realm functions as a site for refuge and renewal, where the search for inner freedom can inspire civic organisation and collective action.

Highlights include: 

• A new body of twelve paintings and drawings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, tracing the ways in which Pan-Africanism has shaped the inner lives of generations of communities like her own, and offering a point of reflection on the possibilities that remain open within the partial liberation we collectively inhabit 
• David Hammons’ African-American Flag, 1990, and Chris Ofili’s 2003 Union Black, each of which rework the Pan-African flag with those of the artists’ respective countries: the United States and the United Kingdom
• Paintings by Wifredo Lam, whose formal experiments in the 1940s gave form to the transformative potential of Négritude, particularly its emphasis on recuperating African cultural histories to destabilise colonial certitudes
• Marlene Dumas’ Albino, 1986 will be exhibited in relation to Magdalene Odundo’s ceramic Charcoal-Burnished Vessel, 1983 and Teardrop, 1996: three works that refuse the assignation of Blackness as a term for fixing or delimiting aesthetic, social or cultural meanings
• Simone Leigh’s striking sculpture Dunham, 2017, an homage to the trailblazing dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, whose dance practice introduced movement styles from Africa and the Caribbean into the Western vocabulary of modern dance
• Liz Johnson Artur’s film, Untitled, 2016, stitches together photographs, film, locally archived oral testimony, and recordings from pirate radio stations to present an intergenerational portrait of everyday realities in Britain
• Farid Belkahia’s Cuba Sí, 1961, created by Belkahia as an expression of support for Cuba, as well as a universal cry for self-determination, in the year the United States attempted a re-invasion of the country
• Gestural works by Bertina Lopes, informed by her role in Mozambique’s anticolonial struggle, articulate an aesthetics of solidarity that spans the years before and after her political exile in Rome
• Inji Efflatoun’s painting Dreams of the Detainee, 1961, which sees the artist reflect on her imprisonment for four and a half years for political activism — undertaken in fact on behalf of the ideals that originally motivated the postcolonial Egyptian government which had put her in prison
• Kader Attia’s large-scale installation, Asesinos! Asesinos!, 2014 in which 35 household doors and 10 megaphones evoke bodies in a crowd surging forward in protest, a surge similarly seen in Fatma Arargi’s Popular Resistance, 1956, whose works captured the undercurrent of Egyptian life in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952
• Figurative work by Claudette Johnson, at once monumental and intimate, that sensitively captures sitters in contemplative repose
• Photography by Ingrid Pollard capturing influential figures, Black feminist organisations and political liberation movements active across the U.K. during the 1980s 
• Original copies of independent magazines, ephemeral publications, anthologies and mass-circulation periodicals, from W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903), to Angela Y. Davis’ If They Come in the Morning (1971) and EBONY magazine 

This exhibition is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in collaboration with Barbican London, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou Bruxelles.   

This exhibition is generously supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).
 

About Barbican’s Project a Black Planet season:

This summer, the Barbican presents a major season celebrating the rich influence of Pan-Africanism on contemporary arts and culture. From June to September 2026, more than fifty events across art, cinema, music, performance, talks, and more unfold throughout the Centre, bringing together artists, thinkers, and communities from across the African continent and its global diasporas.

Complementing Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a dedicated film programme charts the circulation of Pan-African ideas across the long twentieth century and into the present, presenting milestone works, rare archival material and contemporary moving-image practice. Together, these films consider how festivals, gatherings, resistance movements and cultural networks have forged solidarities and reshaped global imaginaries.

Beyond the Gallery and Cinemas, artists and collaborators expand the season’s themes through installations, live music, talks and gatherings. Alongside these, public events throughout the summer – ranging from a conversation series, listening sessions  and the Sankofa Carnival Performance – invite audiences to explore the legacies of Pan-African activism.

Workshops, parties and gatherings – including a special edition of the Barbican’s anyone can dance late-night dance series – further extend the season into spaces of social practice and collective celebration, highlighting the continuing legacy of Pan-Africanism in music, dance, archives and community organising. For more information, please see our press release here.