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‘Artists should let the cat out of the bag’: Lubaina Himid to represent Britain at 2026 Venice Biennale
She was once forced to exhibit in a corridor by the ICA’s toilets. Now the 70-year-old artist is going to the ‘Olympics of art’ where she has ‘all sorts of things to say about Britain’s history and the British pavilion itself’

Alex Needham
Mon 24 Feb 2025 21.00 CET
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Lubaina Himid, the artist known for her large stage-set-style installations that draw attention to figures overlooked by history, has been picked by the British Council to represent the UK at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

“I’m energised and so up for it,” the artist said of the challenge to fill the British pavilion with her work at “the Olympics of art”. She added: “I was ready to do it when I was 30 – it’s just that the British Council weren’t ready for me.”

Himid, 70, is only the second Black woman to represent the UK at Venice. Sonia Boyce was the first, in 2022, and received the top prize of the Golden Lion for her multimedia installation Feeling Her Way, a celebration of the Black female musicians who had inspired her. At the 2024 biennial, Britain was represented by John Akomfrah.

All three artists are pioneers of Black British art, for instance participating in the First National Black Art Convention, which was held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982. Their work was often overlooked or marginalised by the predominantly white mainstream art establishment, an experience which Himid says will influence her approach to the pavilion.

“We absolutely thought of ourselves as artists, but we were often in places that weren’t dedicated to the showing of art,” Himid said, citing multidisciplinary arts spaces like the Africa Centre and ICA in London. “You might come in for a cup of tea, or be queueing for cinema tickets, and you’d look at our work on the wall. We realised that those were the kinds of environments in which we could speak to the people we wanted to speak to, because they were welcoming.”