April 7 – August 24
Featuring new and significant works, this exhibition is the first full scale European survey presenting the collaborative artistic practice of Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska. Conceived as a performance, the exhibition emerges from a decade-long dialogue between British painter Lubaina Himid (1954, Zanzibar), a leading figure of the British Black Arts Movement, and multi-disciplinary Polish artist Magda Stawarska (1976, Ruda Śląska, Poland), whose practice combines moving image, soundscapes and screen printing.
In their exhibition Nets for Night and Day, memory unfolds as a score narrated through paintings and drawings, as well as sculpture, silkscreen printing, photography and sound installation. Visitors will find themselves on a journey aboard ships, venturing across carts, ambling into dreamscapes rendered by the artists’ and their collective imagination. At the heart of the exhibition is a newly imagined presentation of Zanzibar (1999–2023). The nine diptychs by Himid composing this ‘series of paintings about a series of journeys’ float suspended rhythmically in space and enter in dialogue with a 38-minute sound piece conceived by Stawarska as a ‘libretto’ for the paintings. Each of them, an abstraction at first, present codified clues into Himid’s life. Associated with sound fragments that evoke her personal history, Zanzibar reflects on the multifaceted notions of belonging, loss and memory.
Biographies
Born in Poland in 1976, Magda Stawarska’s multi-disciplinary practice combines moving image, sound, silkscreen prints and painting. Her work often arches around her distinct practice of ‘inner listening’, through which she explores the connections between personal memory, place, and sound, uncovering hidden and conflicting histories. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Artist-to-Artist, Frieze, London; Drift, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London; Plaited Time / Deep Water, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; A Fine Toothed Comb, HOME, Manchester; Rewinding Internationalism, Villa Arson, Nice, and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Her work is in public collections including the Government Art Collection, London, the Arts Council Collection, London and the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection. She is a Research Fellow for Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at the University of Central Lancashire and lives and works in the UK.
Lubaina Himid CBE RA was born in Zanzibar in 1954, and now lives and works in the UK. She is an artist who for over four decades has explored and expanded the possibilities of painting and storytelling to depict contemporary everyday life and to fill gaps in art history. Self-described as a painter, cultural activist, witness, storyteller, and historian, Himid is an influential figure within the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, and has been a champion of women artists in her role as a teacher, curator, critic, and organizer. In 2017, she won the Turner Prize, in 2023 the Maria Lassnig Art Prize, and the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Himid has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions globally including a major 2021 survey at Tate Modern, as well as monographic presentations at UCCA, Beijing; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne; New Museum; Modern Art Oxford; Spike Island, Bristol; Tate Britain, London, and has featured in the 14th and 15th Sharjah Biennials, the 12th Liverpool Biennial; the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 10th Gwangju Biennale. She is Professor Emeritus at The University of Central Lancashire. In 2026, Lubaina Himid will represent Great Britain at the 61st Venice Biennale.