Viewing Project a Black Planet: A Season

Black culture on a cosmic scale.

This summer, the Barbican becomes a meeting point for one of the most ambitious explorations of Pan-Africanism ever staged in the UK. Project a Black Planet unfolds across exhibitions, film, music, performance, talks and communal gatherings, bringing together more than 50 events that trace the movement of ideas, people and culture across Africa and its global diasporas.

At its centre is Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, the first major exhibition to examine both Pan-Africanism’s influence on visual culture and the role artists have played in imagining it. Spanning the 1920s to today, it features more than 300 works from Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe, moving between painting, sculpture, film, installation, photography, journals and posters. The roll call is extraordinary: El Anatsui, Lubaina Himid, David Hammons, Claudette Johnson, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Chris Ofili, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, William Kentridge, Magdalene Odundo and The Otolith Group, among many others.

But the exhibition is only the beginning. Rather than treating Pan-Africanism as history, the Barbican lets it spill across the building. A season of films explores cinema as a site of resistance and exchange, while music follows the rhythms of Black internationalism across continents and generations.

Elsewhere, workshops, talks and communal gatherings consider everything from ritual and nationhood to technology and archives. Expect collective listening sessions, conversations on art and liberation, late-night sets with ORII, and the Sankofa Community Carnival, which closes the season by turning the entire Barbican into a space for celebration.

Less an exhibition than a cultural ecosystem, Project a Black Planet asks what happens when art, music, politics and community are understood not as separate disciplines, but as part of the same conversation.