Sharjah Art Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Nets for Night and Day by Lubaina Himid CBE RA and Magda Stawarska at Mudam Luxembourg Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.

Following an initial presentation titled Plaited Time / Deep Water in Sharjah in Autumn 2023, Nets for Night and Day is the first full-scale European survey of the artists’ collaborative practice. The exhibition, organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, explores over a decade of creative exchange between British painter Lubaina Himid (1954, Zanzibar), a leading figure of the British Black Arts Movement, and multidisciplinary Polish artist Magda Stawarska (1976, Ruda Śląska), whose practice combines moving image, soundscapes, and screen printing. Conceived as a performance, Nets for Night and Day unfolds memory as a score narrated through paintings, drawings, sculpture, silkscreen printing, photography, and sound installation. Comprising over fifty artworks produced between the late 1990s and today, the exhibition invites visitors on a journey aboard ships, across carts, and into dreamscapes shaped by the artists' collective imagination.

At the heart of the exhibition is a newly imagined presentation of Zanzibar (1999–2023), first shown in Sharjah. This striking series of nine painted diptychs by Lubaina Himid narrates journeys—both real and imagined—to and from her birthplace, Zanzibar, suspended in memory and time. Upon entering the West Gallery, visitors will be greeted by the sound of rainfall—recorded from England to Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. This sonic backdrop, composed by Magda Stawarska in dialogue with Himid, serves as a 38-minute multi-channel ‘libretto’ for the paintings. A voice-over, alternating between male and female voices, recounts uneasy movements, memorials, and reconstitutions. Stawarska explains: ‘The process of listening is often at the core of my practice. I am interested in how sound triggers memories while simultaneously anchoring us in a place.’ Conjuring a site of grief—a mother’s mourning—Himid’s voice resonates through the sound installation: women’s tears that fill the ocean. ‘The result is often heart-wrenching,’ notes exhibition curator Dr. Omar Kholeif, Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation.

The question of migration and movement remains one of the most urgent issues of our time. In the East Gallery, screen prints and patterns intertwine with paintings of ships and boats that seem imbued with animism—each vessel bearing multiple lives and histories, suggestive of diverse experiences and industries. ‘The idea of bringing boats into the story became very important,’ says Himid. ‘Boats are places of work, places of rescue, places to live, places for fun, but also places of deep tragedy and horror—places to escape to, places to escape from. I see them as temporary moving homes.’ Here, visitors are invited to engage with paintings, photographs, and sculptures in a carefully choreographed scenography that evokes the different imaginary and real contexts of movement and travel—whether migratory, functional, or aesthetic.

This exhibition continues a journey that started in Sharjah in 2023. Travelling through time and space, works including Himid’s evocative Sharjah Carts (2023) to Stawarska’s moving image works in the Jardin des Sculptures invite visitors to wander into dreamscapes, where they can construct their own individual visions of memory and imagination.

The presentation of this exhibition in Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean is reimagined to reflect the social and cultural contexts of Luxembourg, a country with a diverse immigrant community. Through an intricate dialogue of memory, paint, sound and movement, the exhibition encapsulates the poignancy of lives lived and remembered, offering an unfolding song of longing and belonging, of the distinct contours of loss and the power of memory to resuscitate history and selfhood.

Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The exhibition is curated by Dr Omar Kholeif, Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, with Coordination by Julie Kohn, Curatorial Assistant, Mudam Luxembourg and Exhibition design by Souraya Kreidieh, Senior Collections Researcher and Spatial Designer at Sharjah Art Foundation.

About Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid CBE RA was born in Zanzibar in 1954, and now lives and works in the UK. She is an artist who for over four decades has explored and expanded the possibilities of painting and storytelling to depict contemporary everyday life and to fill gaps in art history. Self-described as a painter, cultural activist, witness, storyteller, and historian, Himid is an influential figure within the British Black arts movement in the 1980s, and has been a champion of women artists in her role as a teacher, curator, critic, and organizer. In 2017, she won the Turner Prize, in 2023 the Maria Lassnig Art Prize, and the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize. Himid has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions globally including a major 2021 survey at Tate Modern, as well as monographic presentations at UCCA, Beijing; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne; New Museum; Modern Art Oxford; Spike Island, Bristol; Tate Britain, London, and has featured in the 14th and 15th Sharjah Biennials, the 12th Liverpool Biennial; the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 10th Gwangju Biennale. Himid is Professor Emeritus at The University of Central Lancashire.

About Magda Stawarska

Born in Poland in 1976, Magda Stawarska’s multi-disciplinary practice combines moving image, sound, silkscreen prints and painting. Her work often arches around her distinct practice of ‘inner listening’, through which she explores the connections between personal memory, place, and sound, uncovering hidden and conflicting histories. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Artist-to-Artist, Frieze, London; Drift, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London; Plaited Time / Deep Water, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; A Fine Toothed Comb, HOME, Manchester; Rewinding Internationalism, Villa Arson, Nice, and Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven. Her work is in public collections including the Government Arts Collection, London, the Arts Council Collection, London and the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection. She is a Research Fellow for Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at the University of Central Lancashire and lives and works in the UK.

About Mudam Luxembourg - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents and collects the most significant art of our time. Through its exhibitions, publications andartistic and educational programme, Mudam fosters research and dialogue while foregrounding the changing nature of art and society. Mudam serves as a reference museum for contemporary art that strives to embody artistic, architectural and cultural excellence.  

Our museum collaborates with artists and cultural producers from around the world. Its artistic programme is accessible, experimental, transnational and transdisciplinary. Art of the past and present guides our ambition to reflect the contemporary world in a way that provokes both thinking and emotions. We stimulate new relationships between ideas, people, communities, generations, objects and stories. 

Mudam promotes creativity, plurality and cultural participation for all. Like Luxembourg itself, the museum is located at the centre of Europe and has an outward-looking vision. We are committed to a more inclusive, tolerant and responsible world, in which museums play a leading role in the transmission of cultural heritage to future generations. Mudam is open: everyone is welcome.

About Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Art Foundation is an advocate, catalyst and producer of contemporary art within the Emirate of Sharjah and the surrounding region, in dialogue with the international arts community. The Foundation advances an experimental and wide-ranging programmatic model that supports the production and presentation of contemporary art, preserves and celebrates the distinct culture of the region and encourages a shared understanding of the transformational role of art. The Foundation’s core initiatives include the long-running Sharjah Biennial, featuring contemporary artists from around the world; the annual March Meeting, a convening of international arts professionals and artists; grants and residencies for artists, curators and cultural producers; ambitious and experimental commissions and a range of travelling exhibitions and scholarly publications.

Established in 2009 to expand programmes beyond the Sharjah Biennial, which launched in 1993, the Foundation is a critical resource for artists and cultural organisations in the Gulf and a conduit for local, regional and international developments in contemporary art. The Foundation’s deep commitment to developing and sustaining the cultural life and heritage of Sharjah is reflected through year-round exhibitions, performances, screenings and educational programmes in the city of Sharjah and across the Emirate, often hosted in historic buildings that have been repurposed as cultural and community centres. A growing collection reflects the Foundation’s support of contemporary artists in the realisation of new work and its recognition of the contributions made by pioneering modern artists from the region and around the world.

Sharjah Art Foundation is a legally independent public body established by Emiri Decree and supported by government funding, grants from national and international nonprofits and cultural organisations, corporate sponsors and individual patrons. Hoor Al Qasimi serves as President and Director. All exhibitions are free and open to the public.

About Sharjah

Sharjah is the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Reflecting the deep commitment to the arts, architectural preservation and cultural education embraced by its ruler, Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Sharjah is home to more than 20 museums and has long been known as the cultural hub of the United Arab Emirates. In 1998, it was named UNESCO's 'Arab Capital of Culture' and has been designated the UNESCO ‘World Book Capital’ for the year 2019.

Media contact

Sharjah Art Foundation, Alyazeyah Al Marri 
alyazeyah@sharjahart.org 
+971 (0)6 5444113