05.11.2025
MACBA explores the Pan-African imaginary through the eyes of a hundred intellectuals and artists
MACBA kicks off Year Thirty with the opening of Project a Black Planet. The Art and Culture of Panafrica. Curated by the museum’s director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Antawan Byrd, Adom Getachew and Matthew S. Witkovsky, the show will run until 6 April 2026. The exhibition reveals the vast influence of Pan-Africanism on the creative, cultural and civic activities that have shaped the socio-political and aesthetic movements defining the last hundred years: two World Wars, the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, independence from colonial powers, the struggle for the downfall of dictatorships and the Civil Rights movements.
On display are over five hundred objects by a hundred artists and intellectuals from Africa, Europe, and North and South America over the past century, from the 1920s – when Pan-Africanism first gained widespread recognition – to the present day. Travelling across temporalities and geographies, this project features popular creations, books, posters, political speeches and music, in dialogue with painting, photography, sculpture and video.
It is worth emphasising the prominence of documentation in different formats. Newspapers, magazines, posters, books and leaflets coexist with the works of art and are just as relevant as the artwork from the point of view of the content of the exhibition. This is the first major international exhibition to analyse the cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism from the beginning of the previous century to the present day with the aim of breaking with the uniform and reductionist image of Pan-Africanism in order to present it as a global, polyphonic movement.
The project’s magnitude is made possible by the combined efforts of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels and the MACBA in Barcelona. Project a Black Planet. The Art and Culture of Panafrica open in Barcelona after its premiere at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in June 2026, will be on view at the Barbican in London. Image: Views of the exhibition “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica”, 2025. Photo: Miquel Coll
It is worth emphasising the prominence of documentation in different formats. Newspapers, magazines, posters, books and leaflets coexist with the works of art and are just as relevant as the artwork from the point of view of the content of the exhibition. This is the first major international exhibition to analyse the cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism from the beginning of the previous century to the present day with the aim of breaking with the uniform and reductionist image of Pan-Africanism in order to present it as a global, polyphonic movement.
The project’s magnitude is made possible by the combined efforts of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels and the MACBA in Barcelona. Project a Black Planet. The Art and Culture of Panafrica open in Barcelona after its premiere at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in June 2026, will be on view at the Barbican in London. Image: Views of the exhibition “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica”, 2025. Photo: Miquel Coll
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