CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago kicks off Panafrica Across Chicago, an unprecedented series of exhibitions and events throughout the year and around the city, exploring cultural Pan-Africanism from 1900 to the present and across four continents.

The first two exhibitions in the series at the Art Institute explore cultural Pan-Africanism through photography and cinema. A term first theorized and brought into wide use around 1900, Pan-Africanism is commonly associated with political movements worldwide that have advanced the call for self-determination and solidarity among peoples of African descent globally. Its centrality to a host of developments in modern art and culture has not, until now, been comprehensively examined through museum exhibitions.

Screens: A Panafrica Film Series will be on view from August 10, 2024 through January 6, 2025. Seven films, most made in the 21st century, recall and reexamine the 1950s through the 1970s—the heyday of anti-colonial, independence movements in Africa and civil rights struggles across the African diaspora. A pair of films produced by Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) within this period of political change and upheaval anchor the film series. Meanwhile, press and studio photographs from the Art Institute collection offer broader perspectives on street life and popular resistance from the 1960s through the present across Africa and the diaspora. “Panafrica,” the promised land named in the exhibition’s title, is presented as a conceptual place where arguments about decolonization, solidarity, and freedom are advanced and negotiated through still and moving images.

The second exhibition is an expansive mural for the Modern Wing, commissioned especially for the Panafrica undertaking from the London-based duo Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun [born 1967] and Anjalika Sagar [born 1968]). A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy, stretching forty feet long and reaching nearly to the top of Griffin Court, will be on view from September 26, 2024 through March 30, 2025. (An accompanying exhibition opens on September 27 at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago.) For twenty years the Otolith Group has made films on aspects of Pan-Africanist history. With this mural the duo pays homage to two legendary film directors from Senegal: Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty. The mural montages the spaces, bodies, faces, forms, gestures, expressions, geometries, and geographies of the cinematic Sahel imagined and invented by Mambéty and Sembène.

“Screens and the Otolith Group mural make a particularly rich start to the Panafrica undertaking in Chicago,” comment the exhibition curators. “Both projects are grounded in the vernacular domains of street photography and commercial cinema, as well as in the mid-20th century era when ‘Pan-Africanism’ reached its widest popular acceptance as a term of cultural and political affirmation. This pair of displays offers much to learn and discover and will equip visitors with a foundational understanding of Pan-Africanism ahead of the fall and winter exhibitions. It’s our hope that people will return regularly to the museum to see the different films and then for the coming shows, especially Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, on view from December 15, 2024 through March 30, 2025.”

Screens and the Otolith Group mural are jointly curated by Antawan I. Byrd, associate curator of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago, and assistant professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, University of Chicago; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago.