Dreaming has a Share in History, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Ruth Clark.
For her current exhibition, Our Kisses are Petals, at Newcastle’s BALTIC, artist Lubaina Himid suspends East African Kanga flags from the ceiling, which the audience are invited to rearrange. Himid—who was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and is now based in Preston, Lancashire—wants the installation to create a “feeling of belonging”, one which is augmented by the poetic lines on the flags by writers such as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.
This feeling is a common thread in Himid’s work; for over 30 years she has made art that visualises the stories of the underrepresented. In 2017, Himid made headlines as the first woman of colour—as well as the first artist aged over 50—to win the Turner Prize for a series of important UK exhibitions that celebrated the black diaspora and dissected institutional racism. The most prominent of these exhibits was, perhaps, Naming the Money (2004), an installation featuring 100 life-sized figures of Africans forcibly brought to Europe in the 18th century to work as servants and labourers, at Spike Island in Bristol. The installation was a triumphant intervention into how black identity and history is commonly ignored in predominantly white societies. In contrast, Himid introduced a cast of characters, each with their own name and identity, as a way of acknowledging the impact of slavery, and as a means of recognising—if not celebrating—the often-overlooked contribution of black people to European society.
Freedom and Change, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Andy Keate
Rising to prominence in the 1980s as a significant figure within the British Black Arts Movement, Himid’s work interrogates the issue of representation. One of her most famous works is the collage cut-out installation A Fashionable Marriage from 1986, which was exhibited last year at Nottingham Contemporary. Based on William Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode 4 (1743), A Fashionable Marriage tackles the history of portraiture as well as the contentious politics of the day by incorporating newspaper headlines and images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Although she considers herself a painter first and foremost, Himid, who is currently professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire, frequently works with ceramics and found objects, as well as drawing on her background in theatre design. Her body of work is unified by her desire to make political statements—be they concerning racial discrimination or gender politics—through creative storytelling that emphasises the hypocrisies and gaps within visual culture and beyond.
As she prepared for the opening of her new exhibition, SLEEK spoke with the artist about visibility, feminism and making art as a survival strategy.
Only Give and Never Let Things be Taken Away, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Ruth Clark
SLEEK: Can you tell us about your current exhibition at BALTIC?
LUBAINA HIMID: For ages, I have been making paintings that I call Kangas. They are East African cloths with a pattern, a border, a central pattern and a motto. Instead of exhibiting these as paper works as I usually do, I’ve had them made into flags. There are seven of them in the gallery, and they are suspended on ropes that are attached to the wall on pulleys at different angles. When you enter the gallery you are faced with a series of curtains, and it doesn’t matter whether you are four or 94, you can go to the pulleys and change the position of the flags. In a sense, it evokes the feeling of when you go into a big cathedral—in England, certainly—and you see all those flags hanging from the ceiling that represent British regiments. And also that thing when you’re watching a sporting event, when people wrap themselves in flags as they go around the stadium. When you enter this space you have this feeling of belonging, this feeling that you can wrap yourself around something other than a national flag. You can wrap yourself in them and you
can take on the texts, which are lines from love poems by poets like Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill and Maud Sulter, as well as lines by James Baldwin.
There will be quite a few events related to the Great Exhibition of the North also [running from 11 May to 30 September at BALTIC]. Every Sunday from 24 June, a big flag will be raised on a flagpole on top of the gallery. At the same time as the flag is raised, all kinds of bands, poets and musicians will perform. For 12 weeks, you can see a fun thing that you might not have been able to see before, and maybe, go to the BALTIC, if you haven’t been before, and understand that it’s free and that it belongs to you.
Safety is the Lost Territory, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens Photo: Andy Keate.
S: Your work often makes political statements in subtle or celebratory ways. Do you think that this is a more powerful way to make a political statement?
LH: I want to communicate with people. I need to get you in there and strike up a conversation about your life, or about something that you feel you ought to know about. That’s why I sometimes make work on ceramics or on fabric, because everybody knows what a plate is, and everybody knows what a cloth is—it’s more approachable. However, when you get near the issues in my work, they are complicated. It’s about communicating and dialoguing, and a collective strategy for changing things. There is no use in me doing what newspapers do or what political activists—in the true sense of the word—do better than me. I’m a painter, that’s what I do. I think survival is about hope. In some ways, it’s not so much celebratory, but it is about coming up with strategies. It is optimism. It’s [saying], “This was an incredible trauma, but we survived this far. How can we make it work?” It’s an impossible project, but that’s what I’ve always done, and to some extent it’s been successful. It’s not for everyone as a lot of people like their politics to be very hard hitting. I’m kind of hoping that [my work] lasts longer than shock.
Shelter in the Shade of Deep Friendship, 2011.
S: Making a political statement through less overt means allows viewers to keep on coming back to the work and read it in new ways, too.
LH: Yes, I think so. And sometimes people go to art spaces because they are curious and because they believe in that way of communicating. I think you can be too patronising if you think people won’t get something unless you clearly signpost it. I think people bring so much of their own lives to those spaces that they do get it. Sometimes they don’t and they need an explanation, but seven out of 10 people get it because they bring so much to it.
S: You won the Turner Prize in December last year. What effect has this had on your practice?
LH: It has made me hurry up and make some of the more risky ideas that I had
in my head come to fruition quicker than I might have. The BALTIC project is part of that. I am going back to my roots as a wannabe theatre designer as I’m talking about audience and agency in quite a risky sort of way. I don’t know if that will work. A lot of projects
now seem worth taking the risk.
S: And in what ways do you think your work has changed since you started out as an artist?
LH: It’s been many decades since I started out. It has changed a lot. It comes and goes in many ways. I probably wouldn’t make big cut-out installations now. I have moved from fast, wet painting to slow, detail painting—and back again. It changes depending on what I am trying to make and what I am trying to say. I would hope it’s better than when I started.
Have Courage in the Crisis, Set yourself Free, 2016. Right: Speed up the Pace of Change, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Andy Keate
"I think survival is about hope. In some ways, it’s not so much celebratory, but it is about coming up with strategies. It is optimism. It’s [saying], “This was an incredible trauma, but we survived this far."
S: How do you think the art scene has changed for artists of colour in the UK since you began?
LH: It’s changed a lot. We were certainly functioning in a world where you couldn’t see black people on the television and that’s pretty astonishing. The project of making ourselves visible really worked. I think the problem is that in order to get noticed you have to ‘box’ yourself into a category. I am hoping younger black artists keep on with the project to put forward their ideas rather than their identity. It’s about not having to initially identify as a black artist—I always will, I always have—but we need to be working towards an art world where what people are making is dynamic because of what it is, rather than who their parents were or where they were born. It’s kind of a wish and [a] dream, but there are younger black artists who have seen the mistake of that ‘boxing’, who understand that it was necessary, but who know the trap of it. They are really fighting it and making work that takes on ideas that resonate with them at the same time as their identity as black artists, rather than foregrounding that as the hot topic. Artists like Evan Ifekoya and Larry Achiampong are dealing with all kinds of things through dance and through sound that you might say are traditional ’black things’, but the work is more than that.
S: To what extent do you believe that art has an obligation to be political? And do you think that the political content of an artwork can overshadow its aesthetic form?
LH: I have taught hundreds of artists over 30 years, there isn’t a formula for it: you just have to be utterly true to yourself. You have to know what you want to say and why you want to say it. Those are the most important things. It doesn’t matter if it’s political or not. You have to follow that and then you can talk about it in all kinds of different ways. It’s easy to get caught up in the strategy of showing or selling or being a celebrity, but the energy for making art will disappear, so you just have to be true to yourself, however self-indulgent that sometimes feels.
Undo the Knots of Poverty, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens. Photo: Andy Keate.
S: You sometimes make collages, a form often associated with a type of feminist art practice. Similarly, you work with ceramics and fabric in such a way that might construed as subverting ‘women’s craft’. Can you discuss this feminist aspect of your work?
LH: I’m not sure if my painting on fabric or the collage is very much a feminist practice. I can see that it comes from a tradition like that. However, it’s more about making works that people will recognise as the ‘thing’ before they recognise what’s being said. It’s more about what’s happening in the work than what it is painted on that is the feminist strand, if you like. I think what comes from the feminist practice is much more the freedom to do what you want. The women in my work are always fighting against the history of women in paintings. They are always resisting things. They are resisting being consumed, but they are also behaving like strategists and activists.
S: What would you like your work to say now?
LH: I am quite passionate about freedom for women to behave how they want to behave, to be able to do the simple things like go for walk in the park after dark and to be who they want to be. It’s a message that’s in an old piece of mine called We Will Be [first shown at Battersea Arts Centre in 1983] and it is about women being able to do what they want and be who they want. That’s the same message that I want to say now.
S: What projects are you working on?
LH: There’s a show next year at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem outside Amsterdam, which I have kind of got in my mind, luckily! It will open around March 2019. For that, I am interested again in fabric —they have a collection of silks and I will be working in response to those.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 58, our summer 2018 issue.