If Pan-Africanism opens the political horizon of Africa’s modernity, then its borderless imagination is best envisioned in cinema’s Africanas. In a new work commissioned for the major exhibitions on Pan-Africanism at the Art Institute, the British duo Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of the Otolith Group have conceived a mural that studies the films directed by Senegalese filmmakers Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty between 1963 and 2003. Picture a mural that montages the spaces, bodies, faces, forms, gestures, expressions, geometries, and geographies of the cinematic Sahel imagined and invented by Mambéty and Sembène.

The Otolith Group: A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy is curated by Antawan I. Byrd, associate curator of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago, and assistant professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Adom Getachew, Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, University of Chicago; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media, Art Institute of Chicago.