Bringing together nearly 300 works spanning Africa and its diasporas, Project a Black Planet sets out to rethink Pan-Africanism as an evolving, “imagined geography”. At London’s Barbican Centre, an ambitious exhibition whose blind spots also reveal the limits of that proposition, before it travels to KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels in spring 2027.
By Vamika Sinha
On September 4, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted by a very large majority the resolution “Correct the Map,” which calls for favoring cartographic projections that more accurately represent the relative sizes of the continents, particularly that of Africa. Adopted by 164 votes in favor, one against, and six abstentions, this non-binding text encourages governments, international institutions, educational establishments, media outlets, and technology companies to use fairer projections, such as Equal Earth. On the Mercator projection, which has been the global standard since the sixteenth century, Africa appears smaller than Greenland, even though it is in reality fourteen times larger. Highlighting the “lasting cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic effects” of this distortion, which contributes to drastically reducing the perceived size of Africa and other regions of the world in the collective imagination, Togo brought this initiative to the United Nations on behalf of the African Group, building on a campaign supported by the African Union.
This proposal for ‘remaking’ the world on fairer, anticolonial terms reads as a successful act of Panafrican resistance. It came at the tail end of the mammoth exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, at London’s Barbican Centre. Originally organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and MACBA in collaboration with the Barbican and KANAL–Centre Pompidou, the show has travelled from Chicago to Barcelona to London, and will now move to Brussels. While the overarching curatorial framework remains the same, each iteration is changed slightly to adapt to its local context.
In London, Project a Black Planet showed nearly 300 works from and about Africa and its diasporas, adding some new presentations, including a final room dedicated to paintings and drawings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The exhibition also spilled outside of the gallery into a Barbican-wide season of over 50 events, spanning film, music, performances, workshops, and talks. Across every iteration, however, Project a Black Planet has claimed to be the first institutional show to both examine how different thinkers and artists have constructed and impacted Pan-Africanism, as well as how Pan-Africanism itself has influenced art and culture over the years.
An “imagined geography”
Every map is a projection; so what futures are we mapping right now? Project a Black Planet’s opening section, titled ‘World-Making’, began with Yto Barrada’s Tectonic Plates (2010), an alternative world map in which the continents are wooden pieces that can be slid into place, like in children’s puzzle games. Only Africa, positioned firmly at the centre, is immovable. Echoing with the news of the UN resolution, Barrada’s work and the wider section signalled an exciting curatorial arc ahead, one that would unabashedly dive into legacies of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and transnational solidarities and resistance –– while reassessing our relation to the term ‘Pan-Africanism’ today. But this sense of anticipation ended up slightly deflating.
In the main exhibition text, Panafrica is not positioned as a fixed region or movement but rather as an ‘imagined geography’ and a ‘conceptual and evolving space’. This capacious rendering is both indebted to and also departs from previous institutional exhibitions that have engaged Panafricanism, particularly Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001-2) – which saw Panfricanism through the lens of political liberation – and Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2004-5), curated by Simon Njami – which shifted the focus from political history to recognising Panafrica and African art as its own cultural field.
Project a Black Planet’s positioning of Panafricanism is the culmination of decades of evolving postcolonial politics and curatorial thinking. But it also felt a bit incoherent and lacking when it came to challenging the divide between North African and sub-Saharan Africa, which Africa Remix once addressed. There was plenty of archival material on display, such as fliers, posters, books and publications, and only a small portion of this covered the 1st Panafrican Cultural Festival held in 1969 in Algiers –– arguably an integral moment in the history of Panafricanism. While one section, ‘Autonomy’, foregrounded works from the Casablanca Art School by Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Melehi, and elsewhere a work explored the Arab Spring, these felt like hastier, less thoughtful additions, with more tenuous relations to the central theme. Many works throughout the show were strong, even stunning. But curatorially, Project a Black Planet failed to feel fresh or to adequately address how Panafricanist thinking can prioritise race and Blackness at the expense of true, cross-continental solidarity.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Barbican Centre, London, until 6 September 2026. The touring exhibition will travel to KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels in spring 2027.
