Lubaina Himid

Untitled

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies. In these excerpts, Himid paints over certain elements of the page and on occasion adds words in order to draw attention to racialized content. What Himid’s project highlights is that through unconscious, or sometimes conscious, juxtapositions the newspaper contributes not only to racial stereotyping by association, but shows a stark lack of awareness to the possibilities of such issues. In fact, one of the reasons why Himid has continued the series for a decade is that in the first year she only found one image of a black person in The Guardian. Himid’s work critically engages with the newspaper’s seemingly ‘harmless’ editorializations, exposing their blindness to the potential layers of visual meaning. 

In the work depicting Venus Williams, Himid paints over the bottom third of the page with a pattern redolent of African designs. The headline, implying the tennis player as difficult or perverse, is coupled with a photograph portraying her as a wild woman. Around the outside of the sheet Himid paints tennis balls on a green ground, suggesting perhaps the green sward of Wimbledon, the last surviving lawn tennis grand slam tournament. The golden sheen of these painted globes perhaps restores the “luster” to the internationally renowned athlete that the Guardian states she lacks.