Spike Island exhibitor Lubaina Himid wins Turner Prize 2017

Artist Lubaina Himid has won the Turner Prize 2017 for a trio of exhibitions including Navigation Charts, presented at Spike Island from January to March, 2017.

The acclaimed trio of exhibitions also included Invisible Strategies at Modern Art Oxford and the group exhibition The Place is Here at Nottingham Contemporary.

At 63 years old, Himid becomes the oldest person to ever win the Turner Prize since it launched in 1984: 2017 saw the introduction of a rule change allowing artists over the age of 50 to compete.

All interior pics: scenes from ‘Navigation Charts’, Spike Island, 2017

The judges praised her “uncompromising tackling of issues including colonial history and how racism persists today”. In her acceptance speech, Himid said: “To the art and cultural historians who cared enough to write essays about my work for decades: thank you, you gave me sustenance in the wilderness years.” In an interview with BBC News following the award ceremony, Himid said: “I was overlooked by critics, by press, but I was never overlooked by art historians or curators or other artists.”

Lubaina Himid. Photo: Edmund Blok for Modern Art Oxford

Known primarily as a painter, Himid has made significant contributions as a curator, archivist and writer focused on the experience of the black diaspora in Britain over the past 30 years. She was a member of the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, and her work is politically critical, tackling questions of race, gender and class.

Himid is a steadfast advocate for the contribution that black artists have made to visual art in Britain. To celebrate her ongoing legacy, Spike Island, Modern Art Oxford and Nottingham Contemporary presented simultaneous exhibitions in early 2017, while works selected from these exhibitions are later touring to firstsite, Colchester and the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston.

At Spike Island, the exhibition Navigation Charts focused on three longstanding concerns for Himid: migration, labour and creativity. It brought into dialogue major works from the past 20 years and was anchored by Naming the Money (2004), a spectacular installation of 100 life-size, painted figures only shown once before in its entirety.

The work portrays a mass gathering of African slave/servants from the courts of 18th Century Europe, including ceramicists, herbalists, dog trainers, toy makers, drummers, dancing masters, viola da gamba players, shoe makers, map makers and painters, while a recorded voiceover reveals their original names and true identities.

Himid’s work explores notions of invisibility and belonging, or, as the artist herself put it in an interview for the Victoria and Albert Museum, “what it means to make the best of a life unpaid and abused that may have been thrust upon you.”

Top image credit: Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004): installation view for Navigation Charts at Spike Island (2017) Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens and National Museums Liverpool: International Slavery Museum. Photograph: Stuart Whipps