Art that needs more space to breathe
Exhibition Lubaina Himid: Our Kisses Are Petals Baltic Centre, Gateshead
Zanzibar-born, but Lancashirebased, the 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid may be the living embodiment of that great contemporary buzz-concept “inclusivity”: both as a teacher, curator and activist who has spent 40 years fighting for greater recognition for black artists, but also as an older woman artist herself. Her ongoing determination to give “a platform to creative individuals who are or have been persistently marginalised” chimes strongly with the current #Metoo and “black lives matter” mood.
This exhibition starts with a garment – the kanga – associated with perhaps the most downtrodden group on Earth: African women. These all-purpose decorative cloths used by East African women as skirts, head-ties and baby-carriers, contain messages in the form of printed Swahili proverbs.
Himid has created her own hand-painted versions of the kanga, emblazoned with emotive phrases from the works of writers who inspire her, from the African-american novelist James Baldwin to the gay activist-poet Essex Hemphill. All of them have spoken up for the “marginalised” but have yet, we are told, to receive global recognition. But if Baldwin isn’t exactly neglected, I doubt many gallery-goers will have heard of Hemphill, who provides the show’s title, “Our kisses are petals, our tongues caress the bloom”, which is arrayed around the exhibition’s first room in letters a foot high, as an artwork in its own right.
The real substance comes in the second room, where Himid’s kangas hang suspended on ropes that traverse the room like washing lines, their “messages” accompanied by images of relevant human organs – “Why are you looking?” with an eyeball, “So many dreams” with a heart – each rendered with a knowing awkwardness, as though effortfully copied from an anatomy textbook, and surrounded by decorative borders typical of traditional kanga design.
Visitors are invited to shift Himid’s paintings via adjustable pulleys, realigning the phrases to create new “poems” – though the short length of the lines makes these interactive possibilities pretty limited. More significantly, while some of Himid’s “kangas” make attractive paintings, with their pastel shades and witty juxtapositions of text and image, the characteristic attributes of the kanga, its pliability and intimate relation to the movement of the human body, are lost in Himid’s oversized and rather stiff, banner-like compositions.
Indeed, while the exhibition claims that kangas are “flags” which “appropriate regimental and ceremonial colonial” forms, this is patently not the case. Some African popular artforms, such as Ghanaian “asafo” flags, very much purloin British military imagery; kangas don’t.
Displayed in a larger, more open space, with the public moving freely around them, Himid’s paintings would have made more sense, but stuck in the bleak box of the room they’ve been allocated, it’s hard to know what message or feeling we’re supposed to come away with, beyond a vaguely celebratory sense that we should all not only value, but identify with people unlike ourselves.
Until Oct 28; 0191 478 1810; Baltic.art