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 pictures of African elders, idealised ancestors. Together they form an utterly absorbing, unfinished, epic story of the diaspora experience. Can the young contemporaries connect with those noble figures and find their way back to Africa? Do they even want to? As the poet Aimé Césaire asked: “Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?”