Project a Black Planet Review: Theory Overwhelms Art at Barbican
The Barbican's latest exhibition, Project a Black Planet, aims to explore Panafrica as a utopian realm of philosophical inquiry, but it gets lost in academic theory, drowning out superb artworks. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's new paintings are a highlight, offering an epic narrative of the diaspora experience, but the show's curatorial approach often obscures the art.
Yiadom-Boakye's room features fictional figures—young women reading, men in Pierrot-like costumes—alongside somber portraits of African elders. This creates an absorbing, unfinished story about identity and connection to Africa, echoing poet Aime Cesaire's question: "Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?" Cesaire was a founder of Negritude, a movement that asserted Blackness against colonial assimilation, and it forms the basis of this exhibition alongside Panafricanism.
Other artists also shine. El Anatsui's The Ancestors Converged Again uses found wood to create spooky, magical figures that seem to release ghosts from the timber. Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos' 1950s sculpture of a half-human, half-pangolin creature is similarly compelling. However, the exhibition as a whole fails to sing. Each section is framed as an essay, with artworks chosen to illustrate arguments, such as those based on sociologist Stuart Hall's ideas, which the works don't always support.
The curators aim to conjure Panafrica as a utopian place, but their approach is leaden and prosaic. Instead of carrying viewers on wings of imagination, they stop to recalibrate their "echo-location machine." The result is an incoherent stew of art from mid-20th-century sculptor Ronald Moody to a Marlene Dumas painting, alongside posters for Do the Right Thing. The show loses sight of Africa itself, reducing millions of people to an abstraction. The catalogue even asks: "But what if Africa were not a place or a figure but a state of mind or a set of practices?"
Artists who pull away from big ideas offer relief. Claudette Johnson's self-portrait captures her in an athletic pose, charged and electric, holding in her anger. Liz Johnson Artur's video montage of decades of Black London life—protests, markets, music, humor—is raw and mesmerizing. But these moments vanish in a jumble of 1950s modernism, glass cases of documents, and artistic connections that exist only in the curators' minds. Project a Black Planet misses the mark, turning what should be clear and impassioned into a dry discourse. It runs at the Barbican, London, from June 11 to September 6.
