“How does someone born in Poland or East Africa end up in northern England?” wonders artist Lubaina Himid. The straddled feeling of having roots in two places is something she shares with Magda Stawarska, her artistic collaborator in “Nets for Night and Day,” an exhibition at the Mudam in Luxembourg. The Turner Prize-winning Himid (1954, born in Zanzibar) and multidisciplinary Polish artist Stawarska (1976, born in Ruda Śląska) were colleagues-turned-friends while professors at the University of Central Lancashire, where Stawarska still runs the silkscreen/screenprinting workshops, and where Himid taught in the fine arts department up until 2021. For over twenty years, they have been supportive of each other’s work, whether toying with silkscreening or sound pieces.
“Nets for Night and Day” is one of their many entwined projects. Just before Himid won the Turner Prize, Stawarska remixed and recomposed the soundtrack (from 2005) for Naming the Money, Himid’s installation of 100 cutouts. This was the pivot point at which trust was solidified in their art binary. They next collaborated on a work called the Blue Grid Test, made for a group show at WIELS in Brussels in 2020-21; the Blue Grid Test was then included in Himid’s 2021-22 Tate Modern show. The two are currently in the middle of preparing another show for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, to debut this summer. Moreover, they often visit each other’s exhibitions, even if they work on them independently.
“Nets for Night and Day” is, as curator Omar Kholeif describes, “a true and genuine convening.” The wall texts are epistolary excerpts between the curator and artists, reflecting warm exchange rather than didacticism. The titular “nets” are symbolic, per Himid, “a voluminous thing, a material thing, but full of gaps and emptiness and nothingness.” The show has over fifty works made between the 1990s and today, all threaded with themes of migration and memory. This exhibition is the second chapter (although re-envisioned) of a version shown in Sharjah in 2023.
Mudam’s West Gallery is overtaken by the installation Zanzibar (1999-2023), a newly conceived presentation of nine diptychs painted by Himid in the 1990s. These were reinvigorated by a new 38-minute multi-channel sound piece composed by Stawarska that includes recordings of trickling rainfall culled from England and Zanzibar, as well as voice-over vocals from BBC Radio 3 programs Himid listened to while painting.
Stawarska’s sonic component changed Himid’s relationship to her existent works and, for her, the paintings are now only to be shown as an installation inextricable from the audio. For Stawarska, the sound is meant to “perambulate”—it is emitted from white speakers that stand sentinel to the paintings, suspended above a dove-gray carpet. For Himid, revisiting past work from her archive is rejuvenated and newly potent through this collaboration.
Mudam’s East Gallery features Himid’s clustered paintings of fanciful ships and architectural boats—big, long or in little studies—which were initially made for her show in 2005 at the Bowes Museum in the north of England in response to its holdings of ceramics and jewelry and carpets collected by the aristocrats who once resided there. The boats suggest human presence, but there is a total absence of people within the works. In this way, the boats also allude to darker histories, namely the British trade of African slaves. To Himid, “the sea is not a site of holiday” but something more treacherous. It can still be poetic, however–Himid cites Toni Morrison: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
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Stawarska’s “wallpaper” screenprints belie Himid’s works, unrolling horizontally across the gallery like table runners, layering overprinted patterns that, she says, resemble a “computational error.” Stawarska’s mélange of print, paint and collage at once obscures the original patterns and reveals “a new matrix.” Stawarska and Himid first bonded over a shared love of patterns—Himid’s mother was a textile designer. Hanging her paintings atop Stawarska’s screenprints “made me see my own work, which I’ve lived with and know very well… in a quite different way,” Himid says with delight, a refreshed gaze imbued into her own production.
In addition to paintings, Himid displays reinvented everyday objects (as she puts it, “If it stands still, I like to paint it”). Here, there are found doors and drawers; in the past, Himid has gathered a whole dinner service—plates, tureens, jugs—and painted on those. The gesture is about reinvesting an approachable object with new meaning and narrative.
The last display is a smattering of Himid’s Sharjah Carts: vintage farm wagons sourced from Eastern Europe, alluding to potential departure and uprooting and “what you take in a hurry.” Stawarska’s adjacent filmic works—videos shot in Poland, along the Bosphorus and in Vienna of landscapes and graffitied walls and electrical poles unfurling from the windows of moving vehicles—are nestled in the floor vents, facing upwards towards the glass roof.
While Himid and Stawarska interlink often, Himid will be independently representing Great Britain at next year’s Venice Biennale. When queried if she had been marked by past editions of the biennial, she mentioned Fred Wilson at the U.S. pavilion as memorable and, more recently, Wael Shawky, last year’s Egyptian representative. As for a foretaste of her own pavilion’s offering: “There will definitely be paintings…those are really always consistent to what I do.”
“Nets for Night and Day” is at Mudam Luxembourg through August 24, 2025.
