This summer, the Barbican Centre will present 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.
Opening as a centrepiece of the Barbican’s Summer 2026 programme, the exhibition brings together more than 300 works spanning over a century, ranging from painting and sculpture to film, journals, posters and archival material produced across Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, North America and Europe.
While Pan-Africanism has long been recognised as a powerful political and philosophical movement advocating solidarity among people of African descent, Project a Black Planet is the first major exhibition to explore the movement’s impact on visual art and culture — and the role artists have played in shaping Pan-African thought.
The exhibition positions Panafrica not as a fixed geography but as a conceptual terrain in which ideas of liberation, solidarity, and cultural exchange have evolved across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through painting, installation, film and printed ephemera, it traces how artists responded to histories of colonialism, independence movements and diaspora.
Among the highlights are works by David Hammons and Chris Ofili, whose reworkings of the Pan-African flag explore questions of national identity in the United States and United Kingdom. Paintings by Wifredo Lam reflect the influence of Négritude and Afro-Caribbean modernism, while Simone Leigh’s sculpture Dunham (2017) pays tribute to pioneering dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham.
Other highlights include photography by Ingrid Pollard documenting Black political and feminist movements in Britain during the 1980s, and a large-scale installation by Kader Attia exploring protest and collective resistance.
Across the Barbican’s Upper and Lower Galleries, the exhibition brings together works by artists including Fatma Aragi, Liz Johnson Artur, Kader Attia, Farid Belkahia, Marlene Dumas, Inji Efflatoun, Ibrahim El-Salhi, Benedict Enwonwu, Dumile Feni, Samuel Fosso, Sonia Gomes, Nicholas Hlobo, Claudette Johnson, William Kentridge, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Bertina Lopes, Ernest Mancoba, Magdalene Odundo, Chris Ofili, Ingrid Pollard, Slavs & Tatars, Tavares Strachan and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
The exhibition forms part of a wider Barbican-wide season exploring Pan-African culture, which will include more than thirty events across film, music, performance, talks and community gatherings throughout the summer.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, 11th June – 6th September 2026, Barbican Art Gallery
Project a Black Planet is co-organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in collaboration with the Barbican and KANAL Centre Pompidou.
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- Barbican exhibition
- Barbican summer programme
- Benedict Enwonwu
- Bertina Lopes
- Chris Ofili
- Claudette Johnson
- Contemporary African Art
- David Hammons
- Dumile Feni
- Ernest Mancoba
- Farid Belkahia
- Fatma Aragi
- Ibrahim El-Salhi
- ingrid Pollard
- Inji Efflatoun
- Kader Attia
- Liz Johnson Artur
- Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
- Magdalene Odundo
- Marlene Dumas
- nicholas hlobo
- Pan-Africanism art
- Project a Black Planet
- Samuel Fosso
- Simone Leigh
- Slavs & Tatars
- Sonia Gomes
- Tavares Strachan
- Wifredo Lam
- William Kentridge
