Lubaina Himid

Audioguide

This painting by Lubaina Himid is inspired by kangas, a distinctive type of fabric cloth which women, and occasionally men, wear draped across their bodies in the African Great Lakes region. This fabric has its roots in the 19th century when a cheap, white, unbleached cotton fabric imported from the United States began to be dyed a deep blue or black by local merchants in East Africa. The earliest designs were block-printed and had repeating black and white spotted motifs, which inspired the name Kanga, which means guineafowl. Kangas have since become an expression of Black female identity and a source of pride, used to mark important moments.

In the 1980s and 90s, Lubaina Himid played a key role in the British Black Arts Movement, a group of young artists who sought to examine issues surrounding race and gender and the legacies of colonialism through their work. Himid grew up in London, but was born in Zanzibar, where kangas are still worn. The cloths are always printed with a central image, a patterned frame and a proverb. For this work, Himid chose a goldfinch as her image and opted for a brown frame on which she painted upright eggs. They're meant to allude to the "fragile form of existence". Underneath she wrote: "Dreaming has a Share in History", a quote from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin who was preoccupied with dreams and dreaming. Dreams, he wrote "have commanded wars, and aeons ago, wars established right and wrong, indeed limits to dreams." He also referred to history as a dream that unconsciously influences the present. The memory of that dream, he said, can awaken a person to the present.