‘Lives depend on accurate histories’

The book concludes with a summary of the activism that underpins Himid’s artistic practice.

‘It’s all about action’: An Interview with Lubaina Himid

This section of the book contains an interview with Himid, conducted a few weeks after she won the Turner Prize, in which she reflects in detail on her activist art. The interview contains information about Himid’s style, influences and future career goals.

‘The slave servant’: Guerrilla Memorialisation and Multi-accented Performances in Naming the Money (2004)

‘Naming the Money’ has become Himid’s signature installation, consisting of 100 colourfully painted figures interacting with each other across a large gallery space accompanied by a soundscape. It speaks to the history of Transatlantic Slavery and to modern modes of labour, which have in common the destruction of identities through the movement across geographies. Scraps of text on accounting paper on the backs of each figure tell poetically the journey of these people through the change in their names when in the new place. The figures act as a guerrilla memorialisation of multiple African diasporic figures who have been forgotten by history. Through the theoretical writings of Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Stuart Hall, Dionne Brand, Hershini Bhana Young, Saidiya Hartman and Giorgio Agamben the chapter explicated the ways in which Himid uses her installation to comment on historical and contemporary trauma and those who are lost and displaced, then and now.

Artist Statement III Return to the Operatic

Naming the Money (Figures 56–58) is probably the most important work I’ve ever made, but for more personal reasons than its scale and reach. The period through which the work took place was one of reflection and development, and perhaps if I’m honest it was a moment at which I thought it would be the last installation I’d ever undertake. By the time it had been shown at the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University I was approaching 50 and had spent the previous five years trying to build on the opportunity of the Tate St Ives residency and show; it was very different work but seemed none the less to be the culmination of a massive output which included shows such as ...

No More Silent Victims: Agency, Authority and Artistry in the Black Woman’s Story in Revenge (1992)

“I was trying to write myself, paint myself, and my compatriots, my fellow black artists, if you like, into the history of British painting’, Lubaina Himid writes of the aesthetic, political, ideological and cultural philosophies undergirding her series, Revenge (1992), which is the subject of this chapter. Warring against the iconographic and invisibilising stranglehold exerted by white western male artists in particular, she says, ‘I’m trying to make a comment about how European artists ... have hijacked some of our African and Caribbean imagery, our bodies and all the rest of it’. Staging her own acts and arts of revenge against white western strategies of appropriating and objectifying Blackwomen’s bodies and art-making traditions, she exults in her successes by declaring that ‘I’ve hijacked some stuff back’. ‘The old solutions did not seem to allow for creative imaginings nor did they enable the black woman’s story to take its place amongst the other voices’, she concedes. Himid diagnoses a situation in which ‘old solutions’ or dominant representational modes are responsible for denying as well as distorting ‘the black woman’s story’. Working to do justice not to one but to many Blackwomen’s stories, she cuts to the heart of the matter: ‘Her story is complex and constantly interwoven through the whole, yet is often told simply and by others as that of a silent victim’.

‘Rituals of reclaiming lost artefacts, refusing oppression and looking for ancestors’ in Heroes and Heroines (1984)

All too aware of the political and cultural minefields generated by memorialisations of white men as icons of racist hate in her Cut-Out Men series, however much she was ‘trying to laugh at them, to sneer, and to jibe, to expose them as liars and cheats’, this chapter discusses Himid’s body of work titled Heroes and Heroines which she decided to create in 1984 in recognition of her realisation that ‘I have since decided that they are best left well alone, ignored’. Visualising Black to white male oppression in this series, Himid re-presents, re-creates and re-imagines the lives of African diasporic women and men, iconic and invisibilised, as they engage in ‘the rituals of reclaiming lost artefacts, refusing oppression and looking for ancestors’. Dramatically to the fore is Himid’s vindication of the absent-presence and present-absence of missing genealogies of Black artistry and activism.

Tracing ‘the living/the dead/the ancestors’ in London and Paris Guidebooks (2009)

‘What are monuments for? Possible landmarks on the urban map: Paris and London’ is the title of a performance script that Himid wrote to accompany London and Paris Guidebooks, a mixed-media work she created in 2009 and which is the subject of this chapter. ‘When I was in Paris a few months ago, I came across a delightful little guide book about London’, her imaginary narrative begins. ‘It lists nearly 300 places of interest. These, it claims, range from the National Gallery to “gruesome” Old St Thomas’s operating theatre and from ancient Charterhouse to modern Canary wharf’. Losing no time in communicating her subversive and satirical message, she relies on biting irony to declare that ‘I was glad to see the publishers had included most of the important landmarks, signalling the contribution made by Africans of the Black diaspora to this great and crazy city’. Clearly, this ‘delightful little guide book’ has succeeded in mapping ‘nearly 300 places of interest’ only to fail to memorialise the ‘contributions made by Africans of the Black diaspora’: a failure Himid takes to task by creating her own radically revisionist and Black-centric tourist guides. As works of social, moral and political reparation, Himid deliberately borrows from jingoistic nationalist language in her newly conceptualised London and Paris Guidebooks in order to decode and destabilise the ideological, political and cultural stranglehold exerted by celebratory narratives that trade only in white supremacist ‘landmarks’. Working across pictorial and textual modes, she endorses strategies of editing, collaging, insertion and juxtaposition to re-present as well as represent the missing ‘contribution made by Africans of the Black diaspora’. With Himid rather than nationalist apologists as our guide, we experience a very different London and Paris. Here she equips her audiences with a radical and revolutionary ‘narrative’ in which these ‘guide books’ texts’ and ‘a random selection of some of the monuments’ visibilise rather than invisi- bilise ‘The living/ The dead/ The ancestors/ The descendants’.

Intervention, Mapping and Excavation: White Caricatures versus Black Dehumanisation in Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007)

Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service was part of the Abolished? exhibition in Lancaster. It uses overpainted eighteenth and early nineteenth century plates, tureens, jugs and dishes to comment on the legacy of slavery in the port town. It displays caricatured white figures which interrogate Lancaster’s slave-produced wealth and noble black figures which memorialise a black presence that has been forgotten in histories of the town. Other images explore local flora and fauna and the slave ships, built in the city, sailing to Africa and then sold on so others can continue the trade. It speaks to the conspicuous consumption built on the exploitation of human traffic and the consequences for those who are exploited. Working against nostalgia for confected histories she shows the full human costs of imperial wealth. Her work cannot fully make amends for the traumatic past but expresses artistically forgotten and elided histories.

Imaging and Imagining ‘Vanished lives of the black diaspora’ in Venetian Maps (1997)

Working to represent, recreate and reimagine denied and distorted traditions of African diasporic artistry, Himid was inspired to create Venetian Maps, the subject of this chapter, and which consists of ‘a series of paintings that illustrated this hidden culture that was incredibly influential but never discussed in general touristic guide book conversation’. As Lubaina Himid observes, ‘Venice though is also a symbol for me to how people of the black diaspora have for centuries been the backbone of the cultural development of many European cities but that this presence is invisible’. She exposes centuries of social, political, historical and cultural injustices: ‘That such a visible set of people, there because they were used as slaves and signifiers of European wealth, could be so invisible in the discussions around the origins of patterns and architectural forms of the countries from which they came has always been a continuing preoccupation of mine’. Warring against white supremacist erasures of a very real Black presence in every area of national, political, social and cultural life, she is under no illusion that ‘Venice looks like it does because Venetians were impressed by North African/Arabic culture its richness and sophistication its intricacy and its colour and spectacular shifting moving symbolism’.

‘Humour, fury, celebration and optimism’: A Politics of Protest and Cut-Out Men (1981–85)

examines the ways in which Himid works to create radically revised and rewritten visual and textual histories, which then become serviceable in contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide. As argued here, Himid’s bodies of work provide alternative blueprints of artistry and activism. No more hard-hitting confirmation of Himid’s determination to combine ‘humour, fury, celebration, and optimism’ in order to ‘challenge the order of things’ and ‘call in question those in power and make them answerable’ can be found than her earliest series, Cut-Out Men, which she created between 1981 and 1985, and which is the focus of this chapter.