Lubaina Himid

1954 (Zanzibar)
Living in : Preston, Royaume-Uni
Artist's webSite
Artist's gallery

Lubaina Himid's figures and motifs are signs, oscillating between enigma and resurgence to designate with modesty the wounds both experienced and transmitted, and to breathe beauty and poetry into the heart of political resistance. His work questions in depth the place of Black people and their representation in European societies. Born with the Black Art Movement in Margaret Thatcher's England in the early 1980s, all of her artistic and theoretical activism is rooted in theater and stagecraft, which she studied at the Royal College of Arts in London.

To illustrate the facts accurately would be a waste of time. In the cold accounting of the archive as well as in the convolutions of the imagination, Lubaina Himid draws scattered elements that feed her work. The scenes she creates leave a great deal to projection: their apparent simplicity, their false naivety, function as a counterpoint to the words and titles she associates with them. For her sentences distil sub-meanings and hidden meanings: to tell heavy stories, Himid chooses the mise en abyme. Thus, wood, cotton, ceramics, brass are the discreet but persistent marks of a vast world network, of a not very "fair" trade. In the hollow, the sea, the bodies, the race for money, the journey without return.



Artist's issues


Issue 83


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