She summons the forgotten, dismantles colonial myth, and transforms gallery space into living history. In 2026, the Turner Prize winner arrives in Venice — and nothing will look quite the same.
There are artists who make work about history, and then there are artists who make history argue back. Lubaina Himid is firmly the latter. When the British Council announced that she would represent the United Kingdom at the 61st Venice Biennale, the art world’s response was less surprise than recognition — a collective sense that this was, somehow, always where things were heading.
A self-described “painter and cultural activist,” Himid rose to prominence in the 1980s as a pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement and a fierce advocate for the visibility of women of color in the visual arts.Nearly four decades on, she arrives at the British Pavilion not as a late discovery but as an artist whose moment, it turns out, has been building all along.
A Practice Built on Reclamation
To understand what Himid is likely to bring to Venice, you have to understand what she has always been doing — which is, essentially, rescuing people from the silence that history imposed on them.
Her landmark installation Naming the Money (2004) remains one of contemporary art’s most quietly devastating achievements. The work presents 100 life-sized figures, each representing an enslaved African brought to serve in the princely courts of Europe — dog trainers, toy makers, mapmakers, dancing masters, musicians, painters. Labels on their backs carry both their original African names and the names their European owners assigned them, while an evocative soundtrack woven from Cuban, Irish, Jewish, and African music fills the space around them.The effect is not grief exactly, but something more unsettling: the sudden, irreversible awareness of how many individuals history has simply chosen not to count.
“I’m not in the business of making work where I repeat the trauma,” Himid has said. “My work is about attempting to belong, about understanding who we are as Black people in the diaspora, how much we have contributed across Europe in terms of culture, building, the wealth of the European machine.” That distinction — between bearing witness to suffering and insisting on presence, dignity, and contribution — is what gives her work its particular charge.
Painting Across Time Zones
Himid’s canvases are not documents. They are something stranger and more alive. As she has described it, the characters in her paintings are not necessarily anchored to the same moment in time or history: “They crisscross through time and talk to each other — and you — about how the past holds clues to the present, and is a place of potential action.”
This restless, non-linear approach to narrative is what separates her from painters who simply illustrate historical grievance. Her jewel-toned scenes carry a psychological depth that reimagines relationships between people whose lives and stories were otherwise lost— not as they were, but as they might have been, or should have been, or could still be. The critic Fred Moten once observed that her “celebration in, and of, color” is not decorative but purposeful, becoming, in his phrase, “the ultimate solemnity.”
Theatre, Sound, and the Architecture of Experience
Trained in theatre design, Himid has long combined painting with sound and sculptural installation, working across a diversity of materials, narratives, and formats to enact social critique. This theatrical sensibility is crucial. Her exhibitions are not collections of objects to be moved past — they are environments to be inhabited, sequences to be experienced. Visitors do not view her work so much as find themselves inside it.
A survey of her career spanning nearly five decades reveals the full range of this approach: painting, sound installations, found objects, cut-outs, canvases — mediums that layer storytelling and challenge both mainstream art history and the sociopolitical obstacles still faced by communities of African heritage.
For the British Pavilion, commissioner Emma Dexter has noted that Himid will “transform the Pavilion with vibrant, articulate and spatially dynamic artworks,” taking visitors on what she calls “an exploratory journey.” Given Himid’s track record, that is likely an understatement.
Venice as a Stage for What Comes Next
There is something fitting about Himid arriving in Venice specifically. Born in Zanzibar, she moved to England as an infant, and themes of maritime arrival and displacement have recurred throughout her work ever since — reflections of her own origins and the broader experience of the African diaspora. Lubaina Himid Venice, a city that owes its entire identity to the sea, to trade routes, to the movement of peoples and goods across water, is a stage almost too perfectly suited to what she has spent her career saying.
She has promised that the exhibition will be “something particularly special” — work that “resonates with multiple audiences, communicates with complex histories, and looks to a more collaborative future.” For an artist who has spent decades insisting that the future cannot be built without an honest reckoning with the past, that ambition is not rhetoric. It is the whole point.
From community halls and disused spaces in 1980s London to the most prestigious platform in the international art world — Lubaina Himid has not changed direction. She has simply, at last, been given the room her work always demanded. In 2026, Venice will find out what happens when that room is the British Pavilion, and the artist filling it has been waiting, very patiently, for exactly this conversation.
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