Viewing Lubaina Himid & Magda Stawarska: Zanzibar at Lisson Gallery

Echoes of home.

This June, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska bring painting, sound and memory together in a new iteration of Zanzibar at Lisson Gallery. The exhibition pairs nine diptychs painted by Himid in 1999 with a 38-minute sound work composed by Stawarska in 2023.

This exhibition marks an unusual chapter in Himid’s practice. Known for her figurative storytelling, in Zanzibar she turns to abstraction, using bright cuboid forms and zigzag patterns to recall her birthplace and the early events that brought her to London as a baby. Fishing nets, shells, shutters, rosewater and cloves surface across her paintings, fragments of family history and later journeys back to Zanzibar.

Stawarska’s eight-channel soundtrack, meanwhile, is woven through the paintings in the same freeform rhythm as their arrangement across the gallery. Taarab music from Zanzibar, fragments of opera, archival BBC broadcasts, orchestral passages and Himid’s own voice meet narrated sections from a guidebook given to Himid’s mother by her father. Stawarska describes the process as a careful choreography of layered sound, building a shifting landscape of emotion. Together, the paintings and soundtrack draw on both artists’ experiences of displacement and belonging, moving between past journeys, present desires and imagined futures. With their long-running collaboration also continuing at the British Pavilion in Venice this summer, Zanzibar is a moving reflection on home and the memories that stay with us, however far we travel.