Barbican season season celebrates the influence of Pan-Africanism
A season celebrating the influence of Pan-Africanism on contemporary arts and culture runs from June to September 2026 at the Barbican Centre, with more than 50 events including art, cinema, music, performance and talks.
While Pan-Africanism has long been recognised as a galvanising force in 20th-century socio-political 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 more than 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, Abdel Hadi Al 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.
Highlights include:
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, a homage to the trailblazing dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, whose dance practice introduced movement styles from Africa and the Caribbean into Western 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
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 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 1952 Egyptian Revolution
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 UK in the 1980s
Original copies of independent magazines, 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
About Barbican’s Project a Black Planet season
A season celebrating the rich influence of Pan-Africanism on contemporary arts and culture runs from June to September 2026, with more than 50 events including art, cinema, music, performance and talks.
A film programme will chart the circulation of Pan-African ideas across the 20th century and into the present, presenting milestone works, rare archival material and contemporary material. Together, these films consider how festivals, gatherings, resistance movements and cultural networks have forged solidarities and reshaped global imaginaries.
Artists and collaborators will expand the season’s themes through installations, live music, dance, talks and gatherings. Public events throughout the summer – ranging from a conversation series called Reasonings, and the Sankofa Carnival Performance – will invite audiences to explore the legacies of Pan-African activism, inspired by the Akan proverb of ‘Sankofa’ – learning from the past to build a better future.
Workshops, parties and gatherings, including a special edition of the Barbican’s anyone can dance late-night dance series, will further extend the season, highlighting the continuing legacy of Pan-Africanism in music, dance, archives and community organising.