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‘It's all about action’: An Interview with Lubaina Himid

Celeste-Marie Bernier
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Alan Rice
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
Lubaina Himid
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
Hannah Durkin
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
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Summary

HD: So much of your work is about re-seeing the past and recovering and celebrating lost voices. Do you see the artist as having a special role in recovering hidden histories? Are there stories that an artist can tell that a historian cannot?

LH: I think so. Of course, the historian can actually tell it with more clarity and with the benefit of evidence and can prove it to the doubters or to those wishing to erase or repress the story, so that is incredibly important. But I think what the artist can do is attempt to shift the future. Whereas the historian can accurately tell the past, the artist can make it work in the present and then take the information forward to turn it into some kind of action or some kind of reparation or some kind of memorial or whatever. Some of the time it needs some imagination and it needs some – I think you said before some humanity. In order to make any of these pieces, without being too cosmic about it, I do imagine that I am these people. I do imagine what it's like and I do try to see how that extreme trauma of some of these hundreds and thousands of people's lives in the past still relates now to the less extreme trauma but nonetheless the gross unfairness and disproportionate prejudice and racism that is current today. What I’m mostly trying to do is to get people to understand and to understand myself that the people experiencing this trauma were people, not statistics, not numbers, not different but actually alarmingly the same, alarmingly still people who had to blow their noses, still people who had to eat, still people who had to wear clothes, still people who felt great deep love for other people, still people who gave birth to people. You know, spot the difference, there is no difference. I think it is very easy for people to go to that place if there are names and if there are visual imaginings.

HD: I wonder if you could talk about the importance of recycling and reusing in your work and how this relates to re-seeing?

Type
Chapter
Information
Inside the Invisible
Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid
, pp. 301 - 312
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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