Panafrica across Chicago

Six films by modern and contemporary artists working between Africa and the diaspora underscore the great attention paid by African and African diasporic contemporary artists to legacies of the 1950s and ’60s.

In a new work, the British duo Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group have conceived a mural that studies the films directed by Senegalese filmmakers Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty between 1963 and 2003.

Works by 15 artists in film, photography, and book arts draw attention to three vital and intertwined interactions with the land: as a path to freedom, as a means of spiritual and bodily sustenance, and as a source of enlightenment.

Created in Haiti and Puerto Rico, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s 2021 film is a meditative reflection on a fundamental metaphysical subject: human awareness of time and space. 

The first major exhibition to survey Pan-Africanism’s cultural manifestations gathers together some 350 objects, spanning the 1920s to the present, made by artists on four of the world’s seven continents: Africa, North and South America, and Europe.

What if an African child in 1756 had Instagram when he was enslaved? Equiano.stories reimagines the historic childhood saga of Olaudah Equiano as a self-recorded, first-person account following Equiano from his Igboland village of Essaka through the violent kidnapping that trapped him in chattel slavery. The true story reveals the strength, tenacity, and resistance of African people during the Middle Passage, captured on a ship, headed to the New World.

The first solo museum exhibition in Chicago of self-taught citizen artist vanessa german (born 1976) features a new body of monumental rose quartz and precious gemstone sculptures as part of a multi-disciplinary installation developed during her Gray Center Fellowship supported by the Joyce Foundation.

Building on artist Dawit L. Petros’s ongoing exploration of links between colonization, migration, and modernism related to Italy, East Africa (especially Eritrea and Ethiopia), Libya, and North America, this solo exhibition, Prospetto a Mare, examines the ways in which colonialism and cultural memory are inscribed in the visual culture and built environment of Chicago. 

Two installations by London-based artist and filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah come together to evoke the tremendous loss left in the wake of environmental abuse. The three-channel film Four Nocturnes explores the relationship between humanity's destruction of the natural world and the destruction of humanity. In an accompanying gallery, over 1,000 suspended plastic jugs conjure the vast polluted atmosphere.

This exhibition continues Theaster Gates’s ongoing artistic reflections on the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) and its legacy. Presenting newly restored objects, vintage office furniture, works of art at the JPC headquarters on Michigan Avenue, along with John H. Johnson workout suite, trophies, and memorabilia, When Clouds Roll Away is Gates’s most comprehensive celebration of the archive to date.

This exhibition features a new moving-image work by the Otolith Group, the London-based collective founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, whose films, installations, and performances are powered by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism. It coincides with the presentation of the Otolith Group's major new mural for the Art Institute’s Griffin Court, a prelude to Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.

Established in 2005, the Kampala-based film studio Wakalinga Uganda has developed a countercurrent model of film production, working with ultra-low budgets and community groups to produce action movies that present a refraction of violent Hollywood films. This is the collective’s first wide-ranging exhibition in the US and presents a new work, If Uganda Was America, alongside other recent films.

In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based, Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte situates the architectural archives of his late father as the structural ground for an intervention and interrogation into the spaces and forms of diasporic protest, spectacle, and witnessing. By reformulating photographic remainders of diasporic archives onto materials ranging from drawings to steel framings of unrealized structures, Whyte poetically asks, “What makes a witness? And what does it mean to have become one?”

Inspired by the transformative memory of a visit that Betye Saar, a key figure in the Black Arts Movement, made to the African collections of the Field Museum in the mid-1970s, this exhibition hinges on the artist’s experiments with “wearable” art and brings into focus her gradual shift from working in costume design toward the instantly recognizable collage aesthetic she is justly feted for to this day.