Lubaina Himid
Tate Modern, London, UK
25 November 2021 – 2 October 2022
The exhibition I’ve chosen on this occasion is by Lubaina Himid, currently on show at Tate Modern in London. She is a British artist and curator, known for being one of the first artists involved in the UK’s Black Art movement in the 1980s and for becoming the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Born in Zanzibar to a white English mother and a Black African father, she was brought to London soon after her father’s premature death.
Himid trained in theatre design and later earned a master’s degree in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art in London—both highly relevant to understanding her artistic practice. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her figurative paintings, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and contemporary everyday life.
Upon entering the exhibition, I was surrounded by bright colours and painted questions across the walls, such as: “What does love sound like?”, “What are monuments for?”, and my favourite, “We live in clothes, we live in buildings—do they fit us?” It may feel early in the show to be confronted with such questions, but it immediately challenges you to rethink the world we live in—a quality I consider one of the exhibition’s strongest points.
Throughout the show, Himid presents what life could be like if she could build it herself rather than accept what has already been created for us: a wagon painted with fish, jelly moulds covered in African patterns, paintings of buildings that twist and bend—a proposal for a new kind of architecture.
What convinced me least were her attempts to make the visitor feel like an actor on a theatre stage, with various sound installations scattered across the exhibition. I didn’t connect with this element. I personally prefer her bright, flat-perspective paintings, which are both conceptually and aesthetically compelling. I also felt that this exhibition didn’t fully represent her pioneering role in the UK’s Black Art movement—it felt a bit light from that perspective.
Having said that, it was fascinating to see what one of the UK’s most relevant contemporary artists has been working on recently. I appreciate her effort to make visitors rethink the world in a new way—a lesson especially meaningful for design students, but for all of us as well. Let’s not accept everything we are given. Let’s try to enact change and build a better world: more caring, more imaginative, and ultimately more exciting.
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