Museum exhibitions

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power was first presented at Tate Modern in 2017, travelling to venues in the US for the next two years.  The exhibition text explains the very decisive timeline, with the show opening in 1963, “at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration”.

Art and China after 1989 presented work by 71 key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms.

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic took place at the Tate Liverpool in 2010 and was ultimately inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). As the organisers described it, the exhibition identified a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a landmark exhibition exploring the confluence of African culture and independence through art, film, photography, graphics, architecture, music, literature, and theatre. Featuring works by more than 50 artists from 22 countries, the exhibition was notably extensive, occupying the entire three floors of MoMA P.S.1 in New York City.

Cities on the Move was a seminal traveling exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. The exhibition toured to multiple locations from 1997 to 1999, exploring the cultural influence of East Asia’s meteoric urban development in the late twentieth century through the lens of visual art, architecture, and film.