Lubaina Himid, artist

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2019

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Lubaina Himid is a Turner Prize-winning artist, curator and Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Lubaina was born in Zanzibar in 1954. Her mother was from Britain and her father was originally from the Comoros Islands. He died from malaria when Lubaina was just a few months old, and so she and her mother returned to England. She studied Theatre Design at the Wimbledon College of Art and began organising exhibitions of works by fellow black women artists in the early 1980s as part of the Black Art Movement. Her own work focuses on black identity, often shining a light on the slave trade and the contribution made by the people of the black diaspora. She was the first black woman to win the Turner Prize, and was also its oldest winner, at the age of 63. She was appointed an MBE in 2010 and a CBE in 2018. She lives and works in Preston. BOOK CHOICE: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy LUXURY ITEM: An endless supply of self-ironing Japanese shirts CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Suzanne by Nina Simone Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:05.1	I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desire Island Discs Podcast.
0:08.5	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take
0:13.2	with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.3	For right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:20.1	I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.7	Music Radio Music
0:42.2	My cast away this week is the artist, Lubeyna Himid.
0:45.7	She made headlines when she won the Turner Prize in 2017, but her career began 40 years
0:50.9	ago when she decided to issue set design for a different kind of theatre.
0:55.9	Many art catalogs talk about immersive installations, but hers really walk the walk.
1:01.4	One piece boasts 100 life-size figures that the audience must weave amongst
1:05.8	and other features huge flags hung on giant pulleys, which we are invited to move and rearrange.
1:12.6	Black identity, creativity, politics and the lives of the people of the African diaspora
1:17.8	are recurrent themes in her work.
1:19.9	She describes herself as a fillerine of gaps, working to make visible narratives that might
1:24.7	otherwise go unrequited.
1:27.0	She says, I need to be able to see myself.
1:30.2	I need to make paintings that feel like what it means to be me.
1:33.9	We need to feel we belong in those shared spaces, telling stories of the black experience
1:39.0	that are both everyday and extraordinary is what I'm here to do.
1:43.3	Lubeyna Himid, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
	...

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