Lubaina Himid

If you walk through the markets of Accra, or south London, you’ll be walking among hundreds of exuberant people of the world, yet many are descendants of slaves. You go to a Jewish wedding and the people survive, understand, carry their history. They are stronger than history, that is the point. My figures say: “You tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.”

I’m not in the business of making work where I repeat the trauma. My work is about attempting to belong, about understanding who we are as black people in the diaspora, how much we have contributed across Europe in terms of culture, building, the wealth of the European machine. Never mind the American machine, that’s a whole other story. -Lubaina Himid