As sonically grating as it is, the banjo is a perfect metaphor for the messiness of modern history. Based on traditional African stringed instruments, the banjo came to life in the hands of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean before finding its feet in the poor American South. Now, it’s a ubiquitous symbol of white redneckery, with a violent aura heaped on it thanks to ‘Deliverance’. Messy, see? So when you encounter two banjo cases daubed with hand-painted slogans in Lubaina Himid’s first show of new work since winning the Turner Prize last year you’d better believe they’re carrying some serious symbolism.
Himid is a mutator. She takes sources and objects and twists them into something new. Banjo cases become soft-bellied sculpture poems, chunks of piano lids become makeshift canvases for paintings of fish, drawers are hung on the walls, hiding brightly coloured portraits. One big painting takes a work by society painter James Tissot and swaps out the characters’ races and genders. Instead of a posh hetero white couple, now two black men embrace on the deck of a ship, their eyes filled with desire and sadness.
Other paintings show woven baskets, a weeping man, birds and decorative patterns. Throughout, the main sense you get is of fluidity: ideas, identities, aesthetics, culture and histories swishing back and forth, flowing into one another.
It’s like Himid is repainting and reclaiming the past and things around her. She’s using her bold, direct, simple figurative paintings to ask questions about why things are the way they are. It’s only in seeing the questions asked that you realise how hard the answers are to come by.
@eddyfrankel
