Project a Black Planet review: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing

What happened

According to The Guardian’s source item, Project a Black Planet review: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing, Barbican, London This exhibition is so in love with the theoretical whimsy of utopian Panafrica that it loses superb artworks in an indigestible intellectual stew Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a painter with the imagination of a great novelist. Her contribution to the Barbican’s exhibition about Panafrica in art and culture deserves to win the Booker prize. She paints fictional people not portraits – a young woman reading avidly, a man standing alone in Pierrot-like fancy clothes, another wearing a cool green coat. You wonder if they are siblings, their scattered trajectories taking them through contemporary life as if this were a book by Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. For this brand new group of paintings she has a white-walled room to herself. While her young moderns are captured in their ironies along the side walls, at the ends of the room, in uneasy relation to them, hang sombre pictur

Context

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What to watch

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Source

Primary source: Project a Black Planet review: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.