TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Dreaming Has a Share in History’: Biding Time in the Work of Lubaina Himid
AU - Price, Dorothy
N1 - This peer-reviewed article will be published in a special issue of the journal Art History that I am co-editing with the artist Sonia Boyce OBE RA. It is the outcome from her 3-year AHRC funded project Black Artists and Modernism and will likely have a major impact on the field of British art history
PY - 2021/6/28
Y1 - 2021/6/28
N2 - This essay analyses a selection of work by British painter Lubaina Himid through the lens of time, specifically non-synchronous time as adumbrated by Ernst Bloch, conjunctural time after Stuart Hall, and constellations of Benjaminian time. It engages in close visual readings of Naming the Money (2004), Tousssaint L'Ouverture (1987), and a series of nine paintings Himid has referred to as the Walter Benjamin Kangas (2016), also known as New Kangas from the Archive. Taking different kinds of time as its structural framework, the essay presents new ways of thinking about these artworks that cross past and present narratives of trauma, political agency, subjectivity and change. The essay demonstrates how the use of colour, installation and collage, in a re-address to history, to art history, to monuments, to time, to memory and to visibility, are central to Himid's practices as an artist: a practice in which she wrests painting from its traditional function as an instrument for white western canon formation, and re-deploys it in dialogical relation to its origins.
AB - This essay analyses a selection of work by British painter Lubaina Himid through the lens of time, specifically non-synchronous time as adumbrated by Ernst Bloch, conjunctural time after Stuart Hall, and constellations of Benjaminian time. It engages in close visual readings of Naming the Money (2004), Tousssaint L'Ouverture (1987), and a series of nine paintings Himid has referred to as the Walter Benjamin Kangas (2016), also known as New Kangas from the Archive. Taking different kinds of time as its structural framework, the essay presents new ways of thinking about these artworks that cross past and present narratives of trauma, political agency, subjectivity and change. The essay demonstrates how the use of colour, installation and collage, in a re-address to history, to art history, to monuments, to time, to memory and to visibility, are central to Himid's practices as an artist: a practice in which she wrests painting from its traditional function as an instrument for white western canon formation, and re-deploys it in dialogical relation to its origins.
U2 - 10.1111/1467-8365.12586
DO - 10.1111/1467-8365.12586
M3 - Article
SN - 0141-6790
VL - 44
SP - 650
EP - 675
JO - Art History
JF - Art History
IS - 3
ER -