Lubaina Himid: A Fine Toothed Comb – Interview part two

Marjorie H Morgan

Writer Marjorie H Morgan continues her conversation with Lubaina Himid, CBE RA, the British Turner Prize-winning artist born in Zanzibar, Tanzania who moved to the UK at a young age. Following a career in theatre and interior design in the 1970s, she has subsequently concentrated on creating, curating, and teaching art, becoming a pivotal figure in the Black British arts movement.

Himid’s solo exhibition at Tate Modern (November 2021 - July 2022) was the first by a Black woman artist in that gallery space. For Manchester-based HOME, Himid has curated A Fine Toothed Comb, an exhibition which addresses hidden and forgotten layers within the city of Manchester, on show until 07 January 2024. The exhibition features new commissions of Himid’s own work, alongside commissions from Preston-based artists Magda Stawarska, Rebecca Chesney and Tracy Hill.

Read part one of the interview Lubaina Himid: A Fine Toothed Comb here.

Marjorie H. Morgan: Reflecting especially on Magda Stawarska’s work and your work, the two things that I’ve picked up on what you’ve said is that you’ve placed your work within invisible spots in the gallery. Can you expand on that curational choice?

Lubaina Himid: Yes, the invisible spots are very much not the centre, you don’t walk in and go, “Oh! That’s Lubaina’s work”. You see other things before you see it. You pass it, and think, “Oh, there it is.” Hidden in plain sight.

MHM: That adds to what you said before, it’s there in plain sight, but it’s not centralised; so, could you perhaps talk about displacement, and relationships and representations of these hidden people, but how the communities are hidden because people don’t want to see them, when in fact they are very present.

LH: Yes, that’s exactly and precisely it. There are two things going on. Those people in precarious situations are people who are sometimes walking around going to work. They are not just the people sheltering in the doorway.

MHM: Or the tents. When I first saw the row of tents in Manchester, I was horrified that there was almost a semi-permanent village there.

LH: Yes, but there are almost seven and a half thousand people in Manchester living in that homeless and precarious situation where you’re going to work each day for your job washing up in a restaurant or whatever, but you’d better keep hold of that job otherwise you are going to be in that tent. So those people are very much visible, and exactly like you say, nobody wants to know because it’s frightening. It’s frightening if you are managing to keep everything together, it’s frightening to see how easy it is for that to fall out of balance.

Two things going on, the people who are in this precarious situation, I think it’s important to say too, have agency but it’s about how they’re having to use their energy, by making sure this doesn’t happen to them.

Or making sure if it does happen to them, they have a plan. It makes someone, as a person, much more aware than you need to be if you have a lovely house that you’ve inherited or bought the lovely house and it’s all paid for, and you have a nice steady job that pays all the bills. And we wouldn’t want to take that away from anybody, but there are millions of people that don’t have that.

MHM: That security. Some people are a pay check away from the tent essentially.

LH: That’s right and if you don’t have the precarity in your life you don’t think about it because you don’t have to.

MHM: I think that’s quite generous saying you don’t have to; I think it’s also that people don’t want to because if they do then that changes their relationship with the people they see.

LH: In a sense what I’m trying to do is to say these people, not the actual people but the representations of the people are here in this gallery. They are there. You can ignore them, you can try to ignore them because there are a lot of other things going on, but once you start to think about hidden springs 100m down, disappearing birds, two cities where the Jewish community was murdered and got rid of and ghettoised, and another city where they weren’t, this city, you then are thinking about now, the everyday and the people you pass, and the people you’ll pass on your way back to your workplace or on the way to where you’re meeting your friend, or on the way back to your home. So, we’re kind of bringing disappeared and hidden things into the space that we found outside the space.

In a way the gallery space is the outside inside.

MHM: So, it’s a reversal and a conversation starter.

LH: Absolutely. And I think that we think we can do it because we’re the sort of artists who are not the artists who bang very loudly, but we’re always pointing things out and say, ‘This is happening.’

We know lots of people who come to the gallery, who come to any of our showing spaces, know that it’s happening, but they probably wouldn’t necessarily know about the four things.

You might absolutely have an understanding of that precarity of living, but never know there are springs 100 meters down, or not engage with the fact that there are 120 pages of British birds, and only maybe about 30 pages of them will still be there in 30 years’ time.

Those sorts of things are alarming but I think they’re all things that you can have an individual part in trying to make it right.

You can tell other people, you can join small groups and try to make a difference, you can write to your MP of course; we both know if you want to get something changed, or you want to draw attention to it it’s doing it in small organic ways.

MHM: It’s a bit like this phrase that Gina Belafonte used when she visited Liverpool in 2018: this installation of A Fine Toothed Comb could be viewed as ‘Artivism’. It’s art and activism linked together, putting a spotlight on Manchester. Although this installation appears site specific at first glance, would you consider that this installation is positioned to start conversations not just about Manchester, but globally?

LH: I think so, because you could do a version of this whole exhibition somewhere else. It’s not as if Manchester is the only city where these bad and these extraordinary things are happening.

Absolutely. We, all of us, are taking on global issues here, for instance, we absolutely know that there are water shortages globally, but the water dowsers, we think of them as a bit odd, a bit …

MHM: Other worldly.

LH: Other worldly, yes. But actually if we trained them and took them to places where water is very scarce, might we be able to change some kind of situation? If it didn’t work, it didn’t work, doesn’t matter, but nobody’s trying it.

MHM: That’s an interesting concept, going back to go forwards.

LH: Absolutely. All of us are trying to make something that will bring people to a place and then take them somewhere else with that energy. Number one, we are artists, we absolutely take delight and use our entire day and all our resources to try to create something to start a conversation.

MHM: What is next for the curation of A Fine Toothed Comb featuring your work alongside the work of Magda Stawarska, Rebecca Chesney, and Tracy Hill?

LH: I think there are several things. I hope that what they’ve made will start some other conversations for them, with people, maybe in other cities in other ways, who may think, “Ah, if we work with one or other of these artists we could make something else”, using their powers of investigation to help change or start some other conversations.

As artists I want them to be seen by other curators, other artists, other venues so there’s that level going on.

I think they’re saying such important things about either the nature of human relationships to buildings, or people’s understanding of what’s around them in the natural world within cities, or people’s understanding of how the personal is political.

I’m hoping for those big conversations to happen, those small personal advances in their career as well. For me, I would like more institutions to be brave enough to say to me, “Would you like to do a project that’s not just about what fits with their idea of what a Black artist should do.”

To have the nerve to have a Black artist working with you, not just have the usual, what I call ‘colouring in’.

MHM: You’ve been creating art, and curating since the 1980s with one of your aims to show that Black artists are artists primarily and it’s not all about the Blackness of the person, it’s about the art.

LH: Indeed, it’s about the creative ways we all function. That’s why I would put on say, The Thin Black Line in the early 1980s with eleven artists, none of whom made work about the same subject: in the same way, it didn’t look the same.

It’s exactly the same as if you put eleven French artists, or eleven artists from the Philippines, all of us are completely different.

In the 1980s you were still having to say we looked different. Now we’ve gone a bit further, we’ve tried to move on from there. The difference and the richness in the difference between say, Marlene Smith who was born in the 1960s in Birmingham of a family who had come from the Caribbean, a slightly different experience from Ingrid Pollard who was born in Guyana and came aged four years old.

It comes from the same captured Africans, the Transatlantic horror and the trade in enslaved people, but the Black British experience, for instance, that those two had was completely different from each other, never mind my experience being born in Zanzibar and coming here aged four months old.

Therefore, obviously we’re going to make work that’s completely different because we are unspeakably different people. It’s one of those weird things, you don’t want to be defined from the outside, but in order to be visible we had to define ourselves from the inside, but we had to make work that was really impactful and transformative for the audiences that we wanted to attract which was other Black women.

We wanted to say we know that you are doing and thinking and feeling some similar things, some completely different things, come to this showing space and share this with us.

MHM: Do you think that’s almost a compromise to do that, in order to get past the gatekeepers, you have to make some sacrifices with your art?

LH: I really try to always say to artists that I’m working with, never compromise on the art. I’ll do the compromise on the negotiating, and getting us all in the door, and you don’t compromise one inch on that wall.

MHM: That’s a joy to hear.

LH: It’s the same now with these women, as it was with those women forty years ago. I make the space happen, do the negotiation, brokering, find the funds and try to deal with the flak of it and give artists real room to manoeuvre: that’s what they need. There are lots of restrictions, people often say, “Oh, isn’t it better if artists have lots of restrictions?”. It’s good to have some restrictions, but no, we’ve already got quite a few. And many artists have the restriction of where they can make a thing. Or how much money they have to make a thing. Where are they going to store it. So there’s all those things about resources and restrictions beneath the surface.

MHM: When you’re a freelance, self-employed, working in the gig economy, it’s all a very tentative, and that’s why when you talk about the geological, historical and political issues surrounding the people making the work, and I’m guessing the people viewing the work, will understand the intricacies and the links of those elements.

LH: I think so because we all lead really complicated lives that we keep below the surface because you want to be talking about your next song, or your next performance or your next installation. You don’t want to walk in the room and say, “I’ve got to leave because I need to go and wash up somewhere.” You don’t want to say that otherwise you’re defined as that artist who is a washing up person.

MHM: Thank you for that insight into the artists and the installation in the HOME gallery. Can you tell me if the name, A Fine Toothed Comb, is a challenge to the art institutions at all.

LH: I thought up the phrase, the title, and it’s rather an old-fashioned phrase - A Fine Toothed Comb, people think what on earth is a fine toothed comb? It’s a phrase that’s only used in relation to finding something and revealing what’s hidden, and showing it, sharing it.

I like the fact that it’s quite difficult to say, and you have to think about what on earth that could mean. I’m hoping it’s not off-putting, and that it’s intriguing enough for people to come.

The title is something to do with coming into the city of Manchester, for we all work in Preston, we come to Manchester, then we go away again. So, we observe things, we see things, we experience things, some of us over the past 30 years, and you see and experience a city in a different way when you come and go.

MHM: The title of the installation, A Fine Toothed Comb, is to me an invitation to look beneath the surface, stay a while, have a look, and maybe converse and then act. For me, art is not just about taking it in and then closing it down when you leave the space, it’s about the art staying with you, changing you somehow.

LH: Absolutely, opening up, and enabling you. And you take what you want from it. We’ve offered it, we’ve brought our lives to the space, and then you bring your life to the space, and the work - whether it’s a performance or whether it’s a static art work or films then it’s the point, the place at which those conversations happen.

MHM: The fulcrum.

LH: Both sets of people, because sometimes the artists and the performers are the audience. So, it’s not two different worlds. Audience is not just some dumb set of people who know nothing, who need artists to tell them stuff, audiences whoever they are bringing hundreds of years of experience and life into the room.

MHM: In the same way, all four of you artists are bringing your combined years of experience and life into the room, and with the presence and contributions of the audience the art work becomes a catalyst for change.

LH: As an audience member you don’t need to take it all on, you just need to find the conversation you want to have.