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The Venice Biennale opening is just days away but Lubaina Himid isn’t in a rush. The artist, who will represent Britain at the “Olympics of art”, is at home in Preston, where there’s an air of calm. Her wife and frequent collaborator Magda Stawarska is making a pot of tea. Gardeners are moving paving slabs in the back yard.
We wander around her beautiful Victorian terrace to the house directly behind. Himid bought it, knocked down a wall between the two properties and has almost finished turning it into a studio. It’s airy, light-filled and serene. Works on canvas are dotted around; paintbrushes sit neatly in custom-made cabinetry. Everything is in its right place.
The reason for the Zen-like vibe could be that Himid has already installed her work ahead of what is the biggest week in her career to date. “I’m very obedient,” she confesses. “I did as I was told, unlike John Akomfrah, who does what the fuck he likes.” She’s joking about her friend Akomfrah, who – along with Sonia Boyce in 2022 and now Himid – completes a trio of black British artists from the same generation who have stormed the pavilion in recent years.
The British Council, which has run the UK’s pavilion for nearly 90 years, gave her a schedule: the work was to be photographed in January, shipped in February and installed by the end of March. When Himid and her team arrived in the Giardini – the Napoleon-era garden where the national pavilions sit and the art world descends every two years – they were the only team on site.
Himid was given April off. But rather than rest, she decided to squeeze in getting hitched before May and the madness of all the vernissage previews. Didn’t she want to take some time off? “We had a break, so we got married,” says Himid matter-of-factly.
The idea of the 71-year-old being obedient doesn’t necessarily fit the public persona of an artist who has said her work must “disrupt”, “remind” and “cause tension”. For more than four decades, she’s called out the hypocrisy of the art world. She tells me she keeps a “little black book” of the “big name” curators who shunned her but now embrace her.
Paintings on canvas, cupboard doors, crockery and textiles have been her weapon of choice, with the subjects often reaching out across the Black Atlantic, into art history, giving silent black figures agency and potency. Her figures are often cut-outs, a mode that harks back to her training in theatre design; she’s wrapped buildings in textile to connect their grandeur to less palatable colonial-era exploits.
She was once dubbed a “cultural terrorist”, although she insists her work is like “perfume” – subtle and seductive, with the ability to linger. Himid faced one battle after another at the Royal College of Art, where she fought her tutors who regularly said there was “no such thing as a black artist”. Himid told them to get stuffed and wrote her thesis on contemporary black British artists before becoming a key figure in the Black Art Movement of the 1980s, where she met fellow travellers like Akomfrah, Boyce, Maud Sulter, Donald Rodney, Claudette Johnson, Veronica Ryan and Ingrid Pollard.
For much of her career, Himid existed in the margins. It wasn’t until the mid-2010s that “mainstream” galleries showed her work. In 2017, aged 63, things shifted when she won the Turner prize after a rule change made artists aged 50 and over eligible. “I won it for all the times where we put our heads above the parapet,” she said. “We tried to do things, we failed, people died in the meantime.” (Sulter died in 2008, Rodney in 1998.) Back in the 80s, she curated and exhibited in several landmark shows, including The Thin Black Line where she took over a corridor in the ICA near the toilet. Now, the grand pavilion at Venice is hers.
How does it feel to represent Britain – a country whose history she has wrestled with for so long? “I know about this place,” says Himid, who moved to the UK as a four-month-old baby with her mother after her father died in Zanzibar. “I’ve seen a lot of things happen, a lot of governments come and go, policies come and go, people come and go. People get born, people die, cities change, and I’ve learned lots from our different cities, not just London,” she adds. “I could smell Brexit coming.”
For Himid, the question of whether or not she should represent Britain is flawed. “The question seems completely mad,” she says. “You never would ask Cathy Wilkes that. It’s a racist question.”
But I’m interested in something more nuanced: was there a part of her that wanted to turn down the honour? The British pavilion is, after all, like the rest of the Venice Biennale, a place that is rooted in ideas of colonialism and the kind of destructive nationalism her work has critiqued for more than four decades. “If you’re an artist, I think, you absolutely believe, whether it’s true or not, that you can change spaces,” she says. “So you believe that once you put your project in there, it becomes about your project.”
Himid’s pavilion – called Predicting History: Testing Translation – sounds a bit like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a seemingly quaint story that veers off to reveal darker layers where horrors may lurk. The interior has been transformed by 78 litres of very bright bianco ottico (optical white) paint. It’s illuminated with a barrisol lighting system to create a brightness reminiscent of a British summer’s day.
“It sounds like a cliched summer’s day too,” adds Himid, who reveals that Stawarska has composed a soundtrack from birdsong, insect chatter and the English folk tune Early One Morning sung by Greek star Nana Mouskouri. “Then it goes slightly odd. And it gets stranger and stranger.”
Himid has created half a dozen vast paintings, each one presenting different figures: boatbuilders, architects, chefs, gardeners and tailors. Throughout her career, Himid has referenced makers and doers: street-sellers, seamen and servants. Here they all represent her central idea: the question of belonging.
The tailors, she explains, are engaged in a conversation about sartorial choices, culture and conformity. “Should you show your identity in the new place by wearing your own clothes, or do you wear these new clothes, even though they don’t fit you,” she says, before rooting her idea in the British high street. “Since when have you found a dress in Primark that accommodates your big bottom? It’s about that – obvious everyday ways everyone understands.”
She also poses 26 questions that, like the soundscape, start off normal enough (“Where do you come from?”, “What reminds you of home?”) and quickly become confounding and even unsettling (“Why are you still here?”, “Can flies settle here?). Some feel like questions black Britons have always wrestled with, from Stuart Hall in the 1980s to CLR James in the 1960s and Amy Ashwood Garvey in the 1940s. “I’m trying to work out whether you hang on to the languages and behaviours of the old place,” she says. “Or whether you try to learn the languages and the behaviours of the new place and what that does to the things you’ve just about remembered.”
At Venice, it won’t only be the politics of immigration on display. Himid is one of the 200 participants in the event who has signed a letter demanding the cancellation of the Israeli pavilion, billed as “a collective refusal to allow you to platform the Israeli state as it commits genocide”.
Why did she sign the letter, organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (Anga)? “You can’t be neutral on something like that,” she says. “I think the issues are deeply, deeply complicated, but bombing and murdering is not deeply complicated. It simply is bombing and murdering, you know?”
Himid is uneasy about the fact that Anga is remaining anonymous, while artists such as her and Chile’s Alfredo Jaar are not. “People who were in the anti-apartheid movement, white people and black people, you knew who they were,” she says. “There are plenty of people now who wouldn’t show my work, because I signed that thing, but I don’t know who Anga are.”
Once again, Himid knows it’s her head that is above the parapet during an event that looks like it could be one of the most politically fraught in years. Israel’s foreign ministry has condemned Anga and the push for a boycott, calling this “anti-Israeli political indoctrination” and “direct discrimination”.
On the walk up from the station, Himid’s studio manager told me that, just before she was announced as Britain’s representative in Venice, they were working on a show that featured the painting Surprise Navigation. In it, two black figures look out at a lagoon and a pair of gondolas (many have cropped up in her work over the years). Himid joked that she was manifesting her Venice selection.
A week later, the British Council unveiled her as its 2026 representative. “I was ready to do it when I was 30,” she said in response to the selection. “It’s just that the British Council weren’t ready for me.” Now her moment is here on the biggest stage of all.
