Interview with Lubaina Himid 

 

My first question is about Preston where we do this interview. I don’t think many French people can locate it. Can you tell us why your home and studio are here?

 

Lubaina Himid : Preston is in the north of England, near Manchester and Liverpool. I came 35 years ago to stay a couple of years and I'm still here. I came to teach in the art department at the University, but I also have connections with this part of the country because my mother's family comes from a small seaside town named Blackpool. I have been coming up here from London every Christmas and every summer all through my childhood. I had a fondness for it, for nostalgic reasons, and I wasn't afraid of it. Of course, you don’t have a lot to stimulate you but I love it because there are endless hours to work. Nothing is really happening except what you make happen. So I built my studio here and taught for 35 years at the art school. But in a funny way, for one half of my family, it was home anyway.

 

You have described yourself as a “diasporic optimist.” What do you mean by this? 

 

I’m absolutely an optimist, otherwise I wouldn't make the work as I make it. I feel I can do this because I have this broad view of where I am in the world. I belong to an enormous bunch of people who came against their will from somewhere else to a new place. I also belong in that category of people who came from something that was felt dangerous. I also came from somewhere else to this place because there was opportunity. I was only four months old when my African father died in Zanzibar, and my English mother felt in danger in a way, because the person she knew was dead. My father's family offered she could stay, or she could leave me and start again in Britain, or she could take me. Taking me—she didn't ask me obviously—she took me out of a place where I did belong. And I spent my life making opportunity and things work and trying to belong. But I feel part of a whole set of people who can see and experience the world in a fluid way, rather than seeing being part of the Black diaspora as something negative. I experience this as something endlessly interesting.

 

One aspect of your artistic practice—spanning printmaking, sculpture, painting, installation, and sound work—can be defined as a renewal of history painting.

 

I'm sort of trying to make painting a space where there are no divisions between history, the present, and the future. I see it as a real space where we can actually live our lives, a place where we can relate and talk. So, if I'm doing history painting, I'm imagining being in that event, or in that series of events, or in that time. I ask myself: how different would I be? I would still eat, fall in love and be frightened of things. I'm also trying to have a conversation with the people that are with my paintings. I like they can have an understanding of why we're here in this place, but also make some decisions about how we might move on to the next stage of our lived lives. It's about understanding how much visitors bring to the shared space. They are bringing all the divorces, all the dance, all the food, all the mistakes into that space with mine. I see it as a huge cacophony of exchanging lives.
I don't want my work to be mysterious or something for which you need to have a vast art education, or actually any kind of education. But if you have it, you're bringing that to the work—and it is very fine. Rather than looking at it and admiring, it's about feeling and being with it, and how we can get out of this situation, or change it in some way. 

 

For some years, you have been collaborating with Magda Stawarska who is conceiving this Festival d’Automne project with you. Can you tell me about your work together?

 

We have been involved with each other's work for almost 20 years. We met because I wanted to make screen prints and she encouraged me. She was then making sound works and asked me to participate in one of her works. I was absolutely blown away by the possibilities of this sound practice. This is how it started. Our recent collaborations really built up our absolute understanding that working together moved both her visual work and my visual work. We maintain strong separate practices but they inform our collaborative practice, which in return informs our separate practices. 

 

Let’s talk about the Salpêtrière project. We visited it together earlier this year. 

 

What was striking and stays with me was that we understood we were in active hospital grounds. It brings a whole set of realities right to the front of your brain, and actually into your body. As we walked in, someone was coming along with his head bandaged. In this perspective, you can see the chapel as a place of hope where you will go recover and get better, or if you are going to die that you will go to heaven. This is where you think about your life whether there are moments when you see backwards a long way or forwards, or you can't see very much because you're very ill and don't know whether the next day will happen.
The size of the place also struck us. It's like a small town inside the chapel. But its architecture allows quite a lot of freedom. Then we understood the layers and histories of who had been in that place and that what should have been a place of reflection, hope, and peace was actually a battleground of power and control. You think about the definitions of illness that can be used against women especially, but against all kind of people, and also how hierarchies can be maintained by deciding who's ill and who isn’t. To think also about the amounts of people who went through this place over the years is really staggering.

 

Conversation conducted by Clément Dirié, December 2025