‘Naming the Money’ is the largest installation to make use of her signature ‘cut-outs’ — paintings made on freestanding, shaped board allowing viewers to walk amongst them — and it tells the story of not only the eighteenth-century slave but also the emigre and the asylum seeker of the present day. Each figure has a real name and a soundtrack gives them a voice, speaking of their fluid identities that shift between their original African names and trades and the new ones imposed on them in Europe. Himid has explained that the work was not about money, but about how the monied classes spent their wealth and flaunted their power. The work has been exhibited several times; at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle in 2004, and again in 2007 at the V&A and Harris Art gallery, Preston. In 2017 Naming the Money was shown in a solo exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol. Himid won the Turner Prize in the same year.

Born in 1954 in Zanzibar, Tanzania, Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art before undertaking an MA in Cultural History at the Royal College of Art. Tackling questions of race, gender and class, her work is politically critical, considering issues of labour, migration and creativity through both painting and installation. Himid is also Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire.

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