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Making Black Histories, Stories and Memories Visible

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

The introduction summarises the key themes of the book and examines the ways in which Lubaina Himid has devoted her practice to researching, remembering and reimagining the lives not only of iconic ... More

The introduction summarises the key themes of the book and examines the ways in which Lubaina Himid has devoted her practice to researching, remembering and reimagining the lives not only of iconic freedom fighters but also of the unknown and unremembered, yet ever-present and ever-powerful enslaved women, children and men who lived and died ‘inside the invisible.’Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

“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, ... More

“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’.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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 ... More

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.Less

‘The “ghost” of it all’: Tragedy, Trauma and a ‘people there and not there’ in Le Rodeur (2016)

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

Working with a painterly rather than a poetic language, Himid made the radical decision to do justice not to ‘fettered and blind’ bodies and souls as torn apart by ‘agony and blood’, but to reimagine ... More

Working with a painterly rather than a poetic language, Himid made the radical decision to do justice not to ‘fettered and blind’ bodies and souls as torn apart by ‘agony and blood’, but to reimagine and recreate empowering narratives of Black diasporic artistry, agency and authority across Le Rodeur (2016–18), a series of acrylic on canvas works which is the subject of this chapter. She was inspired to create these paintings by listening to the pioneering cultural historian Anita Rupprecht deliver an academic paper, entitled ‘Modernity, Melancholy and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Story of the Slave Ship, Le Rodeur (1819)’, in Preston in 2015. As Himid admits, Rupprecht’s talk had an immediate impact by inspiring her own imaginative response. ‘I was having to make pictures while I was listening to her’, she confirms, remembering that ‘I was just listening to her and making pictures in my head about the actual occurrence’. And yet she was all too aware that ‘I couldn’t make paintings of hundreds of people going blind as it was too horrible’. This chapter examines her powerful statement that, ‘I was struck by the horror of the incident but also by the dread of losing sight, especially as a visual artist’, she readily confides, admitting that ‘[i]t was the most frightening thing I could think of’.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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 ... More

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.Less

‘They who document/paint the History hold the Power’: Retelling, Reimagining and Recreating New Narratives of Black Heroism in Toussaint I (1987) and Toussaint II (2002)

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

Across her decades-apart series, Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture I (1988) and Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture II (2002) which are the subject of this chapter, Himid ... More

Across her decades-apart series, Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture I (1988) and Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture II (2002) which are the subject of this chapter, Himid excavates and examines Louverture’s mythical status as the leader of the ‘only successful slave revolution’. ‘History is painted/documented to glorify the living’, she declares, only to conclude at the end of this same page: ‘They who document/paint the History hold the Power’. In this multi-part and multi-layered series, Himid assumes the role not only of the artist but also of the historian, political commentator and social radical in order to ‘paint the History’ and ‘hold the Power’ over retelling, recreating and reimagining the life and works of this African Caribbean freedom fighter. No lone legend, exceptional icon or ‘single figure’, however, Himid’s Louverture is newly rooted in missing genealogies of African diasporic collective and collaborative militancy. In the Black Lives Matter era, the Louverture we need now is not a legendary lone icon but a fallible human being whose activism is embedded within and not separated from his life as a husband, father and grassroots community campaigner.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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 ... More

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’.Less

‘Safety and danger and how to tell the difference’: Suffering, Struggle and Survival in Plan B (1999)

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

‘In 1997 I began to work on a series which was exhibited at Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 – Plan B. The work brought out the theme of safety and danger and how to tell the difference’, Lubaina Himid ... More

‘In 1997 I began to work on a series which was exhibited at Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 – Plan B. The work brought out the theme of safety and danger and how to tell the difference’, Lubaina Himid writes of this series which is the subject of this chapter. ‘What is better, to be stuck in what looks to the outside world to be a safe place but is in fact [a] dangerous place, for ever’, she asks, ‘or to venture into what is a dangerous place but have the free will to find safety’. Debating issues related to physical and psychological confinement versus liberation for African diasporic peoples fighting to survive the prejudices and persecutions of white supremacist western nations, Himid took inspiration for her title for this series from African American writer Chester B. Himes’s ‘violent’ unfinished novel Plan B, published posthumously in 1993. As per his provocative narrative in which the US nation functions as the quintessential ‘dangerous place’ for Black people trying to survive against all odds, she confirms that ‘[t]he paintings recall terrifying experiences related through desperate narratives across the centuries by runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. As the protagonists in Himes’s novel face life-and-death situations, so Himid argues, ‘The work exposes the dilemma of deciding whether to endure the dangers of a current violent situation or risk life-threatening events during the process of escape’. Working beyond Himes’s subject matter to destabilise temporal boundaries and interrogate competing historical contexts, Himid dramatises the tragedies and traumas experienced by ‘runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. She represents and reimagines narratives of slavery and freedom, memories of war and peace and testimonies of domestic and national violence. Himid uses this series to ask and answer a question: ‘Is the inside you know more dangerous to you than the outside you don’t know?’ Here she comes to terms not solely with the corporeal wounding but with the emotional suffering facing past, present and future Black diasporic peoples as a catalyst for her – and by extension their – radical formulation of a new ‘Plan B’ in which she and they endorse radical practices of resistance and revolution.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

‘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 ... More

‘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’.Less

‘Lives depend on accurate histories’

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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

‘Lost hope, abandoned lives, decimated civilisations’: Sites of Cultural Struggle in Beach House (1995)

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

Working to do justice to invisibilised Black lives by dispensing with the confining conventions of realistic portraiture, Himid relied on an abstract lexicon to create her Beach House series, the ... More

Working to do justice to invisibilised Black lives by dispensing with the confining conventions of realistic portraiture, Himid relied on an abstract lexicon to create her Beach House series, the subject of this chapter, in 1995. Across these emotively charged and politically hard-hitting as well as aesthetically experimental works, she removes any literal trace of a human figure to focus solely on the physical structure of the beach house. As external and internal sites and sights of liminality and loss, frailty and rupture, dream and nightmare, confinement and liberation, Himid’s ‘transient temporary structures’ function as surrogate portraits of the vulnerabilities, violations and violences circumscribing Black memories, histories and narratives as defined by the histories and legacies of slavery, colonialism and empire.Less

Reimaging and Reimagining an Absent-Presence in Cotton.com (2003)

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

Himid teases out cotton’s multiple implications as a priceless commodity in the global economy to tell stories that rebound backwards and forwards across time and geographies implicating populations ... More

Himid teases out cotton’s multiple implications as a priceless commodity in the global economy to tell stories that rebound backwards and forwards across time and geographies implicating populations from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe in local spaces and global networks that promote complex narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, class and nation. Her installation connects workers in Manchester to slaves in South Carolina to tell their interconnected stories through black and white patterns that mimic both historical and contemporary communication modes from ballads to mobile phone texts and computer communications. The specific history of the Lancaster Cotton Famine and its link to the American Civil War is key to the message of solidarity told through Cotton.com. Himid’s message of Transatlantic solidarity is discussed in terms of Michael Rothberg’s theoretical frame of multi-dimensional memory as a counterpoint to the limitations of Pierre Nora’s theories of memory and history. In spite of an inadequate material archive, she conjures through her work new ways to articulate forgotten histories that traditional historians elide.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

‘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 ... More

‘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.Less

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

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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 ... More

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.Less

Mapping Space, Debating Place: Jelly Mould Pavilions (2010) and Official Sites and Sights of Slavery and Memory

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilions is an installation which draws attention to Liverpool’s troubled history as the largest eighteenth century slavery port in the world. After a discussion of ... More

Lubaina Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilions is an installation which draws attention to Liverpool’s troubled history as the largest eighteenth century slavery port in the world. After a discussion of Himid’s earlier memorial designs for the slave ship Zong as a way of discussing her ideas about memorialisation, the chapter moves to a discussion of the work using theoretical works about history, memory and trauma including the work of Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, bell hooks, Jean Fisher, Giorgio Agamben, Dionne Brand, Paul Ricoeur, Susan Stewart and Michael Rothberg. In particular it uses Agamben’s idea of “witnessing in the wake of historical silence” as a mode of understanding Himid’s memorial purpose. It describes the postcolonial melancholia that affects Britain and Liverpool in its reaction to its imperial past and describe Himid’s work as a memorializing attempt to show African peoples and their history as central to local and national narratives of explication, to make them visible. The chapter discusses the mobility of the project existing in multiple venues through the city constructing an alternate promenade through the cityscape making for a counter-public intervention. The Jelly Moulds articulate Liverpool’s entanglement in “spectacular conspicuous consumption” through its trade in slave-produced goods such as sugar and uses architectural models to make the point that there is an alternative future.Less

Artist Statement V Working on Paper

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

In this section of the book, Himid discusses Scenes from the Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture I (1987) and Scenes from the Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture II (2002)

Artist Statement II Telling Invisible Stories

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

In this section of the book, Himid discusses Plan B (1999), Inside the Invisible (2001) and Zanzibar (1999).

Artist Statement I Gathering and Reusing

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

In this section of the book, Himid discusses Cut-Out Men (1981–85), A Fashionable Marriage (1987), Freedom and Change (1984) and We Will Be (1983).

Artist Statement III Return to the Operatic

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin

in Inside the invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid

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 ... More

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 ...Less

If the shoe fits: appropriating identity?

Brenda Cooper

in Writing otherwise: Experiments in cultural criticism

Brenda Cooper – like other contributors to this book a trans-continental traveller – writes about her current, displaced, view of her place of origin (South Africa), her long-term academic concerns ... More

Brenda Cooper – like other contributors to this book a trans-continental traveller – writes about her current, displaced, view of her place of origin (South Africa), her long-term academic concerns (African diasporic writing) and, most of all, her revised understanding of herself and her own family history. Through the art works of Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid, she finds herself able to think differently both about her relationship to African culture and about her own identity as a Jewish woman of Eastern European descent. A visual link between a Sulter photograph and a family snapshot provides the opportunity to explore this connection.Less