‘Where are the memories. Where is the evidence. Where are the heroes of black peoples lives’. So Lubaina Himid hand writes in black lettering on the monumental-sized white paper sheet that forms an integral part of her mixed-media installation Bone in the China, which she created as early as 1987 (Figure 1). The emotional poignancy and political power of Himid’s search for ‘memories’, ‘evidence’ and ‘heroes’ is underscored by her decision to inscribe these textual fragments on to a blank sheet from which she absents all physical trace of ‘black peoples lives’. She denies her viewers any self-evident access to Black social, cultural or imaginative realities in this installation. Rather, she chooses to represent only a pencilled-in and grid-like structure in which black squares are abstractly suspended in white space. While she removes categorical ‘evidence’ of Black bodies and souls, Himid inserts a cardboard cut-out of a marble column to expose western art history as a white supremacist battleground. No straightforward pillar of classical antiquity, however, the base of this column resembles a bone. Here, she ensures a very real association between her artwork and human remains by providing a visceral fulfilment of the horrifying promise of her textual label: ‘bone in the china’. For Himid, white western wealth is not only built by but also from the bones and sinews of African diasporic peoples.

‘Success to the Africa Trade’. So reads the propagandistic slogan Himid writes on the spherical ball perched on top of the classical column that she includes in her mixed-media installation. As she bears witness, all attempts to celebrate ‘Success to the Africa Trade’ on monuments, let alone artworks, necessarily distort and deny the ‘memories’, ‘evidence’ and ‘heroes of black peoples lives’. For Himid, the traumatising evidence presented by a human ‘bone’ buried ‘in the china’ offers incontestable proof of transatlantic slavery, euphemistically represented as the ‘Africa Trade’, as a sight and site of unimaginable and un-imageable atrocity and annihilation for Black diasporic peoples, enslaved and free. No less powerfully, as Himid bears witness in her artwork-turned-memorial, the Middle Passage resulted in a mass grave for the ‘60 million and more’ women, children and men who were bought and sold and rendered faceless, bodiless and nameless in a white western imaginary.