Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day

Nets for Night and Day is the first full-scale European survey on the collaborative artistic practice of Lubaina Himid RA CBE and Magda Stawarska. The exhibition presents new and existing works emerging from a decade-long dialogue between British painter Lubaina Himid (1954, Zanzibar), a leading figure of the British Black Arts Movement, and multidisciplinary Polish artist Magda Stawarska (1976, Ruda Śląska), whose practice combines moving image, soundscapes and screen printing. Conceived as a performance, Nets for Night and Day unfolds memory as a score narrated through paintings and drawings, as well as sculpture, silkscreen printing, photography and sound installation. Comprising over fifty artworks produced between the end of the 1990s and today, 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 painted diptychs by Lubaina Himid narrate journeys both real and imagined to and from the place of her birth, Zanzibar, suspended as memories in space and time. As visitors enter the West Gallery, they will be greeted by the sound of rainfall – accumulated from England to Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. This sonic backdrop, composed by Magda Stawarska in dialogue with Himid, ushers in a 38-minute multi-channel “libretto” for the paintings by Himid. A voice-over by a male and female voice narrates uneasy movements, alongside ideas of memorial and reconstitution. Stawarska notes: “The process of listening is often at the core of my practice. I am interested in how sound triggers memories, but at the same time anchors us in a place.” Conjuring a site of and for grief—for a mother’s mourning—“women’s tears that fill the ocean,” utters Himid’s voice in the sound installation. The result is often “heartwrenching’ notes the exhibition’s curator, the Egyptian-born, British author, curator and historian, Dr Omar Kholeif. 

The question of migration and movement persists as one of the most pertinent topics of our time. Whether forced or incidental, it lingers in the public imaginary. In the East Gallery, screen prints and patterns intertwine with paintings of ships and boats that bear their own animism—hold multiple lives, suggestive of multiple forms of experience and industry. “The idea of being able to bring boats into the story became very important. […] Boats are places of work, places of rescue, places to live, places for fun, but also places of deep tragedy and deep horror, places to escape to, places to escape from. I see them as temporary moving homes.” says Himid. Here, spectators are invited to consider—to examine, to code and decode patterns through paintings, photographs, sculptures in a choreographed scenography that evokes the different imaginary contexts of and by movement and travel—whether it be a migratory expanse or a functional and aesthetic one.

This exhibition is the second and re-imagined convening on a journey that started in Sharjah in 2023. Travelling with us time and again, through vessels that sleep and awake, such as Himid’s Sharjah Carts and Stawarska’s evocative moving image works in the Jardin des Sculptures, the exhibition is further activated by each individual’s lived experience and context. Here, visitors will be invited to perambulate around overpainted carts, to wander into dreamscapes rendered by the artists and to settle into and construct their own individual sense of the imagination.

Nets for Night and Day is the most ambitious presentation of Himid and Stawarska’s collaborative practice to date. Through a carefully constructed dialogue, this newly rendered project was crafted with Luxembourg in mind, a country with an itinerant and diverse immigrant community. The exhibition reflects the poignancy of lives lived and constructed through memory and paint, sound and movement, constellating into a song that exudes one’s sense of longing and belonging, the distinct contours of loss, and the power of memory to resuscitate.

Guest curator: Dr Omar Kholeif, Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation
Coordination: Julie Kohn, Curatorial Assistant, Mudam Luxembourg
Exhibition design: Souraya Kreidieh, Senior Collections Researcher and Spatial Designer at Sharjah Art Foundation

The exhibition Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.