“How do people born in Poland or East Africa end up in northern England?” wondering about artist Lubaina Himid. She shares the feeling of rooting across two places with Magda Stawarska, who shared with her art collaborator Magda Stawarska at an exhibition held in Mudam in Luckembourg. 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 teach in the fine arts department up until 2021.
“Night and the Night” is one of their many entangled projects. Before Himid wins the Turner Award Name MoneyHimid installed 100 incisions. This is the key point in which trust is consolidated in its artistic binary. Next, they collaborated on a work called The Bluenet test, A group performance in Wiels in Brussels in 2020-21; Blue grid test It is then included in Himid’s 2021-22 Tate Modern Show. Currently, the two are preparing for another show for the Cambridge Kettle Yard, which will debut this summer. Furthermore, even if they are independently in each other’s exhibitions, they often visit each other’s exhibitions.
As curator Omar Kholeif described, “Night and Daytime Nets” are “real and real convening.” Wall text is an excerpt from letters between curators and artists, reflecting warm communication rather than handouts. The nominal “net” is said to be symbolic, “a huge thing, a material thing, but full of blankness, emptiness and nothingness.” The show has more than fifty works from the 1990s to the present, all of which are themed on the theme of migration and memory. The exhibition is the second chapter of the version displayed in Sharjah in 2023 (although redefined).
Mudam’s West Gallery is replaced by installation Zanzibar (1999-2023), a new conceptual statement about nine quadratic times drawn by Himid in the 1990s. These are revitalized by a new 38-minute multi-channel sound record composed of Stawarska, which includes recordings of rainfall snapped up from England and Zanzibar, and the Voice-Over sound of the BBC Radio 3 show Himid’s Voice-Over sound Himid heard while painting.
Stawarska’s sound components changed Himid’s relationship with her existing work, and for her, the paintings can now only be displayed as audio-related installations. For Stawarska, the sound means “perambulate” – it is emitted by white speakers hanging from paintings above dove grey carpet. For Himid, the past work of revisiting her archives through this collaboration has been rejuvenated and novel.
Mudam’s East Gallery features the gathering paintings of Himid’s grand boats and architectural boats, a Big, Big, long or small study – originally performed in 2005 at the Bowes Museum in northern England in response to the ceramics, jewelry and carpets collected by the Aristocrats who once lived there. These ships suggest the existence of human beings, but there is no one in them. In this way, the ships also suggest a darker history, the African slave trade in Britain. For Himid, “the sea is not a place for holidays” but something more dangerous. However, it can still be poetic – Himed quotes Toni Morrison: “All people
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Stawarska’s “wallpaper” screen printing of Xinshidi’s works, spreading horizontally in the gallery, like a table runner, layered patterns, which she says are similar to “calculation errors.” The chaos of printing, paint and collage of Stawarska immediately obscures the original pattern and reveals the “new matrix”. Stawarska and Himid were first and foremost a shared love for pattern-Himid’s mother was a textile designer. Himid said happily, hanging her painting on the screen print of Stawarska: “Let me see my work, I live with it, and understand it in a completely different way.”
In addition to painting, Himid shows reinvented everyday objects (as she said: “If it is still, I like painting”). Here, there are doors and drawers found. In the past, Himid collected the entire dinner service – plates, Tureens, jugs – and painted on these services. Gestures are about reinvesting an approachable object with new meanings and narratives.
The last display is Himid Sharjah Shopping Cart: The retro farm van is from Eastern Europe, suggesting potential departures and uproots, and “actions you’re eager to take.” The film work adjacent to Stawarska – Videos in Poland, the landscape shot along Bosphorus and Vienna, graffiti walls and telephone poles exposed from the windows of the moving vehicles – sits in floor vents, facing upwards, and upwards.
Although Himid and Stawarska are often connected, Himid will represent the UK independently at next year’s Venice Biennale. When asked if she was tagged by past biennials, she mentioned Fred Wilson in the U.S. Pavilion that was memorable, and most recently, last year’s Egyptian representative Wael Shawky. As for her own pavilion prophecy: “There will certainly be paintings…this is indeed always consistent with what I do.”
“The web of day and night”As of August 24, 2025, located in Luxembourg, Mudam.
