Project a Black Planet at the Barbican: Art, Identity and a Heartbeat

Notes from the field on atmosphere, memory, and the spaces that stay with us.

Some exhibitions leave you remembering a particular artwork. Project a Black Planet stayed with me through a sound: a heartbeat.

Visiting the Barbican’s Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, I found myself slowing down. In my notes, I wrote, “Being in the exhibition causes you to slow down and take it all in.” There was a complex story to follow, but also colour, texture and movement asking for attention.

The exhibition explored the influence of Pan-Africanism on art and culture, bringing together work from Africa and its global diasporas. This encounter with Pan-African art raised a question: how do you give form to connections between people whose lives unfold across different countries, histories and cultures?

A heartbeat among the art

“Heartbeat as the background sound.” “Simple yet effective.”

Those were two of my observations from the visit. Among everything there was to look at and consider, that sound stayed with me. A heartbeat is familiar, yet hearing it within an exhibition changes the attention you give it.

Looking back, I see it as a useful starting point for my response to Black Planet. Questions of freedom, identity and belonging can feel enormous. A heartbeat brings the scale back to a body, to someone living.

Elsewhere, my notes moved between the Black freedom struggle, Brixton, police brutality and everyday Black communities. The question “are you going to be black or a woman” also found its way onto the page. It is a difficult question to sit with, asking how identities that coexist within one person can be treated as competing concerns.

There was plenty to think about. The sound offered another way into that experience: something to feel while taking in the ideas.

Azikiwe Mohammed, My First Time

The materials that caught my eye

My attention kept returning to how the work was made. Primary colours, moving images and sculptural materials all appeared in my notes. Creativity was being expressed through many different forms, each requiring its own kind of looking.

A work by Simone Leigh was my favourite. Beside her name, I wrote three materials: terracotta, porcelain and raffia.

That small list says something about how I encounter art. With my background in interiors, I often begin by noticing texture, form and the relationship between materials. It is a thread I explored in Design Lessons I’m Taking Into 2026: Textures, Colour, and Spaces That Tell a Story. Here, those qualities gave me a point of connection within a much wider cultural history.

I also noted Wifredo Lam and wrote, “his work is dancing its’s alive.” It is an instinctive observation, but one I want to keep. Sometimes the first response to a work captures something that a more polished explanation might lose.

The exhibition gave me space for both: thinking about what the works addressed and noticing what their colours, surfaces and movement did to my attention.

Simone Leigh sculpture Dunham, 2017

Connections beyond the map

One of the most interesting observations in my notebook was that “Pan-Africanism challenges Western ways of mapping.” I recorded an image of Africa at the centre, with the surrounding continents moving.

It prompted me to consider how much a map can shape our sense of importance, distance and connection. Change the centre, and the relationships around it appear differently.

That observation feels especially relevant following the UN General Assembly’s September 2026 vote to “Correct the Map”. The resolution encouraged wider use of equal-area projections, including Equal Earth, to show continents in their correct relative proportions. It addresses the way Mercator enlarges land nearer the poles, making Africa appear comparatively smaller. For me, this connects the exhibition’s questions about representation to the everyday images through which we learn to see the world.

My notes traced connections across Africa, Europe and the Caribbean, with references to communities in Paris, London and New York. From my British-Ghanaian perspective, this was a particularly compelling thread. There were many places and experiences within the conversation, rather than one account of Black identity.

This interest in how culture takes physical form also runs through my piece on African restaurants in London and their design. At Black Planet, the setting was different, but my curiosity about materials, identity and storytelling remained.

What stayed with me was the way those ideas became tangible through art. A heartbeat, a gathering of materials, a moving image, a different view of the world: each offered a way to pay attention.

Black Planet gave me plenty to read and consider. It also reminded me to leave room for the quieter, instinctive observations—the ones I wrote down before I knew quite why they mattered.

Yto Barrada Tectonic Plate 2010

Photograph by Vanessa Agyemang, edited with AI. Some artwork details may differ from the originals.

Notes From the Field

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