Project a Black Planet review: theory overwhelms where it should sing

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a painter with the imagination of a great novelist. She paints fictional people not portraits — a young woman reading avidly, a man in Pierrot-like fancy clothes, another in a cool green coat. For this group of paintings she has a white-walled room to herself; her young moderns line the side walls while sombre pictures of African elders hang at the ends, together forming an utterly absorbing, unfinished epic of the diaspora.

As Aimé Césaire asked: "Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?" Other artists here also arrest and move. El Anatsui’s The Ancestors Converged Again assembles spooky, magical figures carved from found hunks of wood so it genuinely looks as if he has found these beings, releasing their ghosts.

Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos’s 1950s sculpture of a half-human, half-pangolin creature is another compelling work.

yiadom-boakye, el anatsui, dos santos, diaspora, aimé césaire, ancestors converged, painting, sculpture, african elders, pierrot