Panafrica: Image, Music, Text

Pan-Africanism is seen primarily as a political project. But in the many guises it takes, it also engages in cultural and aesthetic innovation. Imagining Panafrica as the promised land implied a utopian endeavor, new forms of representation and new strategies of dissemination. Focusing on iconography, orality and poetry, this symposium examines how certain artistic and aesthetic practices of the 20th century shaped Pan-African thought.

Panafrica: Image, Text, Sound kickstarts a multi-year and multi-sited series of public programs connected to Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, the first exhibition expressly devoted to surveying modern and contemporary cultural activity through a pan-Africanist lens. The exhibition brings together several hundred examples of creative production in architecture, design, film, literature, sound, and visual art, from the 1920s to the present. The exhibition opens at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, and will subsequently travel to venues including to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Summer 2025) and to KANAL-Centre Pompidou (Fall/Winter 2025/2026).