Black Atlas, A Screening with Director Edward George

The Institute is delighted to partner with the Warburg Institute (London) for the Paris première of Black Atlas, a new film or ‘image essay’ by multidisciplinary artist and founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective Edward George.

Developed by George during a 12-month residency at the Warburg Institute in 2025, Black Atlas explores the Image of the Black archive – a collection of over 30,000 images which documents representations of people of African descent from antiquity to the civil rights era.

The Image of the Black archive was launched by French-American art collectors, patrons and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil in the 1960s in response to the civil rights movement in the USA.

The project employed leading scholars to create a collection of reference photographs of paintings, sculpture, manuscripts, decorative arts, and other objects from Western art that depict people of African descent. From the mid-1970s, these were published in a multi-volume book series with accompanying art historical scholarship and context; the fifth in the ongoing series was published in 2014.

Originally established in Paris and later expanded with an office in Houston, the Paris version of the archive is now housed at the Warburg Institute as part of its Photographic Collection, and the Houston version at Harvard University as part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Edward George worked within this archive to produce his new film from sequences of the collection’s images, reanimating the archive as both a site of cultural history and a tool for speculative thinking. The images are narrated by George – producing a meditation on time, place, and presence; and on art as a medium of transcendence, a technology of power, and an affirmation of a humanist, anti-racist project.

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Host or Publisher University of London Institute in Paris