Autumn 2011 Issue - University of Central Lancashire

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6 Feature Articles ‘Thin Black Line(s)’ - Tate Britain An Interview with Lubaina Himid School of Art, Design & Performance Professor Mike Holmes, Head of the Graduate Research School, and Alison Naylor went to meet with Lubaina Himid to talk about the forthcoming Tate Britain exposition – ‘Thin Black Line(s)’. Mike joined Lubaina in the Centre for Contemporary Art at 37 St Peters Street, and began with a key question – What is it that you do? What I do is two things, my raison d’être is to get the cultural contribution of people of the African diaspora recognised. First, I am most recognised as a curator. In the early 1980s I curated a number of ground breaking exhibitions in London at quite prestigious, but still alternative, galleries that highlighted the fact that there were black women making art. It sounds ludicrous now but in the early 1980s nobody acknowledged that fact. I make exhibitions of art works at whose centre is the premise that people from the African diaspora have made a significant contribution to the cultural landscape. In this way I reveal their hidden histories. Second, is the work I create myself. My early work is about Toussaint Louverture, who led a slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s; and about Yaa Asantewaa who led a rebellion in Ghana. I make portrait cut-outs or a series of paintings about particular people that very few people are writing about. I am not a historian, but I try to make hidden lives real by imaging them and by making art works that can accompany historical accounts. One of my biggest and most well-known pieces of work is called ‘Naming the Money’, which is a series of 100 life-sized wood cut-out, painted figures. Each figure was an imaginary slave servant and each had a poem or series of texts that went with it. These were displayed in large galleries; Hatton in Newcastle; the V&A in London and even here at the Harris. You were able to walk amongst these figures and read about their lives as real people rather than slaves, not numbers, not victims but as contributors to European cultural activity. So that is what I do. The current project for the Tate is a celebration; a marking of and a relook at the exhibition I curated in the 1980s. The Tate wanted to revisit those exhibitions, find out how they came together, how they happened, look at the massive amount of archive material that I have on those shows and on those artists that were in those shows, look again at some of the work, and look at the issues that we didn’t talk about at the time. For example we didn’t talk about ourselves as artists although we talked about ourselves as political activists. I think lots of us who continued to be artists missed out on some aspects because we aligned ourselves with that political activism. However we were activists and we managed to change a lot of things. Now there are a lot of younger black artists who want to know about where we made this work, and the practicalities of our art work. We are revisiting this, its political intent and what we achieved in the last 25 years since the exhibition. The political aspect is important in your work and in the work of other black artists who appeared in the exhibitions you curated? Certainly my work as an artist has always had a political motivation. It is fairly gently objectified and I was never in the ‘vanguard’ movement of black art, where Eddie Chambers or Keith Piper were storming the citadel of the British art world; I am a much more negotiating person. I placed myself within artists’ communities, academia and the museum world so as to broker
Feature Articles 7 conversations between these worlds. In the past 20 years I have formed alliances with art historians who would write about this work in a much more useful way than journalists. I have encouraged curators of museums to buy the work of the artists of the black diaspora, making their work part of history. I have had to encourage the artists to make their work and to engage the art world in discourses. So I see myself as a broker between several worlds. What do you mean by “revealing histories”? I suppose what I am most interested in is where the people of the African diaspora who left the continent in the 1600/1700s, have made an impact of some kind through their music or visual arts, or just generally. I am interested in an artist who is interested in the history of where they have come from or where their families were taken from. I am from East Africa, from Tanzania, from Zanzibar. One of the things I have myself been doing in last five years is getting people to understand that there at least 52 countries in the African continent. To have knowledge of any one of the creative histories of those countries is a challenge. That history of creativity has then influenced generations of artists who have moved across Europe and the Americas. It is the influences in which I am interested, traced backwards and forwards, that are exchanged with colonialist and with the host countries which then enriches them: how buildings change, colours are introduced, and ways of singing evolve. When you talk about art you are talking about art in the most general sense it is not just painting or sculpture or an installation but it may well extend into the literature and singing, music? Now British Contemporary Art is all of those things on the one hand and on the other hand I have come across very few African American artists or Black British artists who simply call themselves painters. We do have this sense that there are many creativities and have no worries about having poetic texts alongside our paintings or acknowledging the influence of music on installation. My expertise is visual art but visual art now in both the contemporary art context in Britain and in terms of what art of the African diaspora crosses and interconnects the whole time. Do you think that art from the African diaspora has significantly changed the direction of contemporary art, so that it has expanded beyond what it might have been? What we did in the 1980s, which wasn’t being done was to show our work wherever we could in what would nowadays be called ‘pop-up’ galleries or we intervened in places and spaces that were not set out for showing art. We changed the arts engagement with audience. We were much more interested in audiences than we were in curators or the contemporary art cannon. We had shows in community centres or halls because we wanted to communicate directly. At that time we were not interested in the most prestigious places we wanted to speak directly to our own communities, relatives, and friends. At the same time people were protesting in the streets of Brixton and all over the country. It was seen to be something that needed to be contained or engaged with, and so certain groups of cultural and creative people at the Greater London Arts Festival and at various places up and down the country started to engage with those artists. They said we are interested in what you are saying and we
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Page 35 and 36: 35 Editorial team Professor Mike Ho

Autumn 2011 Issue - University of Central Lancashire

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