lubaina himid, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. it's a great pleasure to be here at this exhibition, which you have curated. ijust wonder if it continues a theme that i see in so much of your work over a very long time — that is, trying to make visible people, communities, things which are so often invisible to most of us. would that apply to what you've done here? yes, i think i'm trying to do two things, probably more than two things, but i'm certainly trying to do two things. i'm trying to make a set of artists who are making really interesting work more visible. and i'm trying to show some of the things that those artists and i have seen, observed, discovered in manchester. rooted here in this place, so what do you think this exhibition tells us about manchester, its past and its present, that might not be familiar to even people who live here? well, i think they might be things that are familiar to people who live here. i see audiences as people who bring their stories to an exhibition. so an exhibition is a place where knowledge is exchanged. but most of the things we're talking about in this show are absolutely visible, but not talked about perhaps in quite that way, so not at the forefront of people's discussions about the city, about its regeneration, about the buzz, about the excitement, the culture. we're talking about sometimes how it relates to the natural world, that there are streams running 100 metres below the surface of manchester, that there are people on the brink of homelessness who are leading everyday lives but are only, you know, two degrees from being homeless. people who are homeless are absolutely, in one sense, visible and invisible. but the people that are more invisible are those people who are still in work but only have to be ill for a week or their rent goes up and then they're homeless. so it's that living on the brink in that precarious way that i'm trying to sort of highlight, in a sense, how when you live at a certain level, you have to be absolutely vigilant about yourself, about the city itself, about places you might need to know about that you don't need to know about today. a few years ago, you said, "you know what? "sometimes i describe myself not as an artist, "but as a political strategist." is there a sort of political view or maybe message running through pretty much all of your work? i think so. i think that's true. i think quite often, i'm making paintings and imagining and simply making the moment between a question and an answer. but the question and the answer are very often very loaded and very important. let's talk about your own personal history, because it was a remarkable, in the sense, a very difficult beginning to your life because you were born in zanzibar. your father was from there. your mother was english, but had gone to live with your father in zanzibar. and then your father died very soon after your birth and your mother ultimately decided to bring you back to the uk, which, i guess as you grew up, raised all sorts of issues of identity and belonging and where home really was. do you think that has fundamentally affected your sort of creativity? oh, i do think so. i think i functioned the whole of my life as two people, not half this and half that, but as both those things. and both those things are very similar, of course, because one is an ordinary person living an ordinary life. but it's challenging. that finding a place of belonging is challenging. i think the older you get, i mean, by the time you're the age i am now, i've kind of settled myself with that. but i think growing up, there were challenges. but when i was growing up, it was like the early �*60s, you know. so england was a very different place. even london was a very, very different place. you were more unusual then than you would be now as a mixed—race young woman. i just wonder whether you very consciously, for example, were drawn to the black arts movement. i mean, did you have a real sense of black consciousness at that time? yeah, certainly, because i was raised in london, so i went to art school in london and the minute i was in art school doing theatre design, i understood then much, much more that i was out of the loop. when i was at school i was kind of dealing with it, coping with it not so badly. it wasn't so difficult. but once i was in art school, i realised this was going to be a struggle and i understood why. the theatre world then was very exclusive. you mean you personally were encountering discrimination, prejudice at that time? i don't know if i even knew it was that. but it clearly was that. you know, ijust felt out of it, out of place, out of time, out of rhythm with the world of theatre, even though i was convinced that it was a very strategic political place to be. i thought i saw the possibilities in that because i was interested in exchange with audiences even then. but once i left art school, then i understood, i suppose, what i could do, that i was really very good at talking to other artists, listening to other artists. and i think i thought that because i've been trained as a theatre designer, that i sort of had the ability to communicate in a way that, say, fine artists that young often can't except through their work. but i was good early on at talking and persuading. which brings us to your very important role, notjust as a young artist in this black arts movement, but also as a curator. because i'm just looking at the list of shows that you had a big hand in putting on in the 1980s, when this movement really was impacting british culture. one was five black women. then there was another, black women time now, and then there was, i think, perhaps one of your most celebrated — the thin black line. yeah. i mean, the thing about those exhibitions in the 1980s, those three that you mentioned, is that they all took place in art centres and that's key, because art centres are the places where people come in for one reason and end up doing another thing. so less rarefied, more open? and absolutely welcoming and the sort of the cultural offer, if you like, as you'd call it these days, is very mixed. so you might come in and see a film, but while you're waiting, you might look at an exhibition, or you come in an exhibition and when you've done that, you'll have a cup of tea. so i loved that. and also the people that ran those art centres, battersea arts centre, the ica, the africa centre, were people who wanted that mixture and cross—cultural discussion. were you, were you angry at the time? yeah, but i'm, i'm strategic, so i'm angry when i'm thinking and planning. but then i want to work out how best to get the thing done. and i think along... because a lot of other people were also doing that, eddie chambers was doing that, shakka dedi was doing that, and, you know, claudette johnson and marlene smith were doing that, because we were all doing it at the same time but in different places in britain, it came together. in a way, then at the time, we were simply doing the work, exchanging ideas, wanting to show it. i think probably only a couple of us had the long view, but all of us wanted to show each other and our friends, family and communities what we were doing. we weren't really talking to the white art world. we were making stuff that was about our experiences as black women and discovering that even as black women, we had completely different experiences. your experience of britain in the 1980s is very different if you were born here, very different if you were born in the caribbean and came here, very different if you were born in africa and came here and had a british parent, white british parent. so what we discovered was quite a lot about each other and that was the exciting thing in a way. what you also did in some of your artwork, and this is obviously moving through time to a certain extent, but you would take the ideas that you saw in white art through history and then you would sort of undermine them to a certain extent. i'm thinking of pictures where you would, or installations where you would sort of begin with an idea of an artwork. for example, you might see a wealthy white family being portrayed with black servants in the background, and then you would home in on these black people who were just given a subsidiary, tiny little part of the frame. and you would then tell their stories, whether it be an installation or paint or whatever. and that seems to me a very interesting way of subverting a history of white art. well, i kind of don't see art as white art and black art. i know i talk about black art and that, you know, everybody discusses the black art movement, but all of us went to art schools and we had proper art school educations. and part of that is being taught the history of european art or north american art. and what often happened to me was that i saw black people in the paintings of hogarth. now, hogarth wasn't putting black people in those painting to do me a favour, he was giving a picture of what london or england, more especially, was like at that time. and i thought, "ah, he's done me a favour there. "thank you very much, hogarth. "i will now expand on that." so because i was trained as a theatre designer, i look at everything, what can i take from that? how can i translate that, transfer that, transform that? so it's not so much looking at this kind of art, it's like looking at this painting or this set of people in this painting. who are they? what are they doing? yeah, putting them centre stage. and also confronting very dark stories. i mean, for example, the rodeur story that you depicted in a very different way from that that would have been done in history. the story is basically of a terrible story of a slave ship which was crossing the ocean when a disease swept through the slave cargo and left many, many of the black people, the victims of slavery, blind, and the captain of the ship, as they were useless to him, tossed many of them overboard and they lost their lives. i don't see those people. for a start, they weren't yet slaves, so they were captured africans on a boat. i know for sure that they'd never seen a boat before. they... many, many of them could never have seen the sea before. so i tried to imagine what it must be like to be just taken out of your village one afternoon when you were cooking or you were making something or talking to your children, and then suddenly you're in this place with people, some that you do know, some that you don't know, some that you're related to, some that aren't. you're in a vessel, you don't even know what it is, you're on the sea, you don't know what that is and you're being taken somewhere. you're ravaged by this eye... ..complaint, this eye disease. it becomes absolutely horrendous because everyone is packed together like sardines, as it were, and so it spreads easily. you go blind, the crew goes blind, the white french crew go blind and this boat is somehow, you know... ..sailing across the atlantic in this state of terror and horror. i think the people thrown overboard to some degree, of course, were the lucky ones. you arrive in the small islands off the coast of america. and there were some indigenous people who understood that it was actually quite a mild eye complaint, except they had gone blind. but with the sort of herbs and potions that they used, many people had their sight restored, but of course then, they went on to be slaves. so the paintings i made were about how you come to terms with being somewhere you don't know where you are, you're with people you don't necessarily know, you don't know what's going to happen to you, you don't know whether you're dead or alive. so everyone in those paintings actually has no idea what's going on. those paintings were part of, i guess, the portfolio that won you the turner prize and... ..i�*m wondering whether that was a very bittersweet phenomenon, because you were a very well established artist by then, but you perhaps hadn't had the recognition that perhaps you might have expected. and then you get the turner prize rather later in your career, what, just five or six years ago? and did you feel that at that point, finally, the art world was acknowledging your place? well, it's strange, you know. i did have a bittersweet moment, and i sort of said so very publicly. but the art historians like griselda pollock or dorothy price had been writing about this work for years. and because they'd been writing about it, then when i won the prize and more people, more sort of media people or, yeah, a more sort of general, general public came to know about my work, there in the background were these really scholarly texts about what i'd done. so that then made that success more complete, i think. but i'm just thinking of the lubaina himid who we discussed, you know, had an anger in her in her earlier creative period and through the black arts movement was associated with a sort of radical reframing of the black experience in the uk. did you have qualms in a way about over the last sort of five or six years becoming a part of the art establishment, getting prizes, getting honours? you're, you know, a cbe honoured by the queen. did you think twice about some of that? not at all, because i think i am, i have always been a person who thinks, what can i do with this? what shifts can i still make? how can i spend that money now my artworks are worth more money? how can i usefully, strategically spend that money? which artists can i promote now? where before, no—one would have necessarily taken notice of the artists that i wanted to support, even though i knew they were good. and i couldn't be wrong. i wasn't wrong about sonia boyce, veronica ryan, claudettejohnson. they've won turner prizes, golden lions at venice, so i can't be wrong, right? so now what i can do is say, "look, this is another bunch "of artists who i talk to every day, "who i work with in the same city. "take a look at this." that's what i can do with it. i understood immediately that i then had the ability to say, listen to me. mm. i want to talk to you a little bit about your view of britain and its culture today. your work for many, many years has asked british people and, of course, people far beyond britain, to think very carefully about, for example, the legacy of slavery. some in this country today think that the best way to confront that legacy of imperialism and slavery is to do destructive things, to tear down statues of some of the, mostly men, who were central to the whole slave exploitation experience. do you as an artist support that sort of action to change people's minds? well, i'm kind of famous as a negotiator, a broker, and i'm old—fashioned about destroying cultural things. you know, you start with a statue that everybody absolutely agrees should not be there. this person shouldn't be glorified. but i worry about then, in 50 years' time, us destroying something because the mood has changed again and it's something that we all believe in now. so...i absolutely understand the fury and the — and the great amount of thinking and discussion that went on before statues were pulled down or destroyed. but i would have left the statue there and had the most enormous and beautiful, either another statue next to it that's talking to it, undermining it, laughing at it, or texts that actually tell the detailed history of that person. every person that got murdered, how much money was made, who benefited from it, and leave the thing there and then see how we can renegotiate the history. we talked a little earlier about your sense of belonging and otherness when you were a young woman in �*60, �*70s london. i wonder how you, as an older person now in a different britain, feel about your place in this country today? we have a home secretary, senior figure in the government who has just made a major speech saying multiculturalism has failed in britain. i wonder, because some of the themes you've explored have been absolutely about the place of black people in britain, how you felt about that? well, i think the fact that we're still discussing it means that we haven't gone far enough. if we could have this whole discussion about curating a show, about the art that's involved without discussing those things, we would have really made progress. so we haven't made enough progress, in my opinion. we're not equal in the sense that we should be, because we should just be talking about art and culture. but in a sense, your career is one indication that things have changed. i talked about the embrace you have had from the artistic establishment, the fact that all the big galleries, even the tate modern, they are desperate to show your work, to be associated with you. i mean, to what extent would you say there are still issues here, "but britain has changed a great deal "from the britain i grew up in"? yeah, it has changed a great deal. but we can't be happy with just changing a great deal, knowing that not enough has changed, not enough has changed for women in britain. you know, not enough has changed. i can't be satisfied, at 69, to think, ok, i spent the last 40, 50 years trying to shift and change this thing. you know, if i die tomorrow, i wouldn't have done enough. there wouldn't be enough changes. more needs to happen. you, it seems to me, have been always optimistic about what art can do. ijust picked out a quote of yours when you were talking about your relationship with history, because as we've discussed, quite a lot of your work has reflected upon historical events and people. and you said, "what the artist can do, which the historian cannot, "is attempt to shift the future. "the historian focuses on the past. "the artist can make knowledge of the past, "work in the present, and take the information "forward to turn it into some kind of action or reparation "in the future." that's an optimistic idea about what the artist can do. it is an optimistic idea, but i've spent the last ao—odd years as an artist and i can see that that happens. if you respect audiences for the amount of intelligent curiosity they bring to showing spaces and you speak to audiences, you know, maybe weeks later, they say they've seen something, they hadn't thought about this, they're now thinking about that. you understand that together, once this conversation starts, people spread the word, people behave differently in a very slightly, just slight way every day. it can be done. being an artist is about showing things, it's about transforming and it's about communication. lubaina himid, it's been a pleasure. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you very much. hello there. we've got more heavy rain, more strong winds as we head into thursday, all due, of course, to storm ciaran. that's been tracking its way right the way across the atlantic, heading over the southwest of england. now, it will move eastwards towards east anglia. it will bring more heavy rain and given how wet it's been in october, that could lead to some flooding. the winds also could potentially be dangerous and hazardous, bringing some disruption. this is where we've got the amber wind warnings from the met office. the winds already picking up in the southwest, those stronger winds will transfer through the english channel to affect coastal areas in the southeast of england. the winds are likely to be even stronger for a while in the channel islands — gusts of over 90mph, already had gusts of 100mph along the coast of brittany. so, some really strong winds across the far south of the uk. could be quite windy in other areas, and around the storm, around that low pressure, we've got these showers or longer spells of rain. as the wind picks up in scotland, it will get wetter here. we may miss the worst of the wet weather in northern ireland. temperature—wise, well, of course, nothing to write home about — a cool 10—12 degrees. but at least during the afternoon, the winds in the southwest will start to ease, and that's because the storm is going to be tracking away, and at the same time, it will be weakening. so, as we get into friday, the area of low pressure, what was the storm, is going to be sitting out in the north sea. so, it's not going to be as windy on friday, it's not going to be as wet. there'll be some sunshine, but also some showers blown in, and there'll still be some blustery winds. the windiest weather, perhaps the wettest weather will be across eastern scotland and the northeast of england. and those temperatures may be a degree or so higher, but still only 12 or 13 degrees at best. now, as we head into the weekend, we see that area of low pressure continuing to fade away in the north sea. another one coming in from the atlantic — not expecting this one to be named because the winds aren't going to be as strong. the strong winds will still be through the english channel, but we've got more rain to come across southern parts of the uk, into wales, in the midlands, followed by some showers. further north, there'll be some sunshine and perhaps a few showers as well, and those temperatures not really changing a great deal. so, after all this very wet and very windy weather, we've got some more rain on saturday for the southern half of the uk and then we're all in the same boat on sunday — sunshine and showers and not as windy. live from london, this is bbc news. president biden hails diplomatic efforts that allow more than 400 people leave gaza as the rafah crossing to egypt opens to civilians for the first time since war began. a major incident is declared in parts of southern england as storm ciaran brings strong winds and heavy rain. as the uk hosts the world's first ai safety summit, prime minister rishi sunak says monitoring the risks of artificial intelligence is too important to be left to big tech companies. hello. i'm samantha simmonds. president biden has hailed the diplomatic efforts that allowed the first civilians to leave gaza after weeks of being trapped by the conflict. hundreds of foreign nationals, along with dozens of injured palestinians, were allowed into egypt through the rafah crossing. they entered egypt by the rafah crossing on the border with the injured being treated at field hospitals there. the foreign office says the first british nationals have crossed and more will be taken out in stages over the coming days.

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