Photo: Shafeek Nalakath
Artwork Details:
Artist(s)
Lubaina Himid
Title
Bone in the China: Success to the Africa Trade
Date
1985
Medium(s)
Wooden construction, acrylic on plywood with aluminium, acrylic on canvas
Dimensions/Duration
244 x 122 x 270 cm
Photo Caption
Bone in the China: Success to the Africa Trade
The art of Lubaina Himid—educator, artist, curator and cornerstone of the British Black Art Movement—challenges institutional narratives that have systematically overlooked the legacy of slavery and the African diaspora’s foundational contributions to society. The mixed-media work Bone in the China: Success to the Africa Trade (1985–1987) brings together core themes of Himid’s work. Its multiple components—the disc, off-balance neoclassical column and titular bone as a base—hint at the lives taken to support the resulting edifice. Numerous small black discs, inscribed with ‘our memories’, ‘our heroines’, ‘our contributions’ and ‘our creativity’, surround the column as if weighing down the structure. Himid conjures not only the depiction of counter-narratives but also the speculative repositioning of lives beyond the reaches of entrenched forms of white supremacy and its legacies today.
