Black Atlas

George’s film maps an alternative history by presenting a sequence of photographs from the Warburg Institute’s Menil Archive of The Image of the Black in Western Art. Started in 1960 by Jean and Dominique de Ménil, this groundbreaking archive contains more than 30,000 photographs of paintings, sculpture, manuscripts and other objects that depict people of African descent in Western art from ancient Egypt to the Civil Rights era.

Accompanying the photographs in Black Atlas is a soundtrack of George’s own spoken narrative, with the images presented against a monochrome background similar to the black hessian used in Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

George is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, DJ and founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, known for his work exploring Black musical cultures and Britain’s colonial past.

Black Atlas is currently on display at the Warburg as part of an exhibition of the same name (to 17 January 2026). It then joins the institute’s special collections as the first in a new series of commissions that will interrogate its holdings.