Black Atlas
The Warburg Institute, London
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IN his book “Film Blackness” (2016), Michael Boyce Gillespie argues for a shift in the way we view black film making, not as “a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience, but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race.”

It is a description that could be applied to the work of Edward George, who has an exhibition, The Black Atlas, currently running at the Warburg Institute in London.  

A multi-disciplinary artist and founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, George frames film alongside art and music in an interdisciplinary way that challenges how people of African descent have been represented in Western art forms.

I first discovered the artist through a love of reggae which drew me to his radio show: The Strangeness of Dub. Here, George explores black cultural memory and identity through a mix of critical theory, social history and dub. This music, with its mix of musical styles, samples, and creative use of “space” and “time”, presents a unity of diverse cultural elements which inform the “Black Atlantic” creative identity; the diasporic, “playful” nature of which represents a key element of the contemporary black arts movement in general – and film in particular.

We can also see this approach in the work of John Akomfrah, whose multi-disciplinary installation Listening All Night To The Rain was selected to represent the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2024. With this project, Akomfrah explored themes such as memory, migration and racial injustice in multi-screen sound and time-based works, in what he calls acoustomology; the idea of listening as activism.

For The Black Atlas on the other hand, George has tapped into the Black Archive. Set up in the 1960s in response to the development of the civil rights movement in the US, the project consists of a collection of over 30,000 images which document representations of black people through the ages: in photographs, manuscripts and in Western art in general.

From these images a number of overarching themes emerge, in which “racialised” representations of people of African descent dominate, portraying them as “exotic” and “ornamental,” or “invisible,” or “hidden in plain sight” in the case of Italian Renaissance art. These representations can still be seen into the late 19th century, with the orientalist revival in Western figurative painting, for example, but now inscribed by empire.

George has then used this archive to produce a 57-minute film: “a poetic ‘image essay’ built from sequences of the collection’s images, reanimating the archive as both a site of cultural history and a tool for speculative thinking” (to quote from the institute’s publicity), in which these recurring images and tropes in Western art can be reassessed and reappropriated, in their “reframing” by the artist.

A major influence here has been Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a series of panels in which collaged images trace recurring themes through history. In line with Warburg’s visual and associative approach to history and memory, George has produced a series of triptychs made up of collaged images from the archive, which will change during the course of the exhibition and which will be displayed alongside the film. These present a counterpoint to Warburg’s original Atlas panels, as an ever-shifting series of images, open to interpretation and reinterpretation: and inviting the viewer to meditate on the nature of, and the forms taken, by the representations in the archive.

The title of the exhibition, with its allusions to classical antiquity, is also interesting, drawing comparisons with Martin Bernal’s three volume work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, and which (controversially) argues for an alternative, afrocentric history of the classical world. Indeed, one of the stills from George’s film shows a statue of a woman of African descent in a “classical” pose: could this possibly be a Black Athena?

The “Atlantic” can also be translated as “the sea of Atlas,” so in some ways you have both the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean represented in these two works; possibly each presenting a (comparative) mythology — an alternative, “imaginary” narrative which challenges dominant Western discourses on art and history.

Of course, the last points I am making here are pure conjecture on my part. However, this may also represent a prime example of the type of “speculative thinking” this powerful and thought-provoking exhibition can engender in those who engage with its ideas.

Runs until January 17 2026. Admission free. For more information see: warburg.sas.ac.uk