Artists

Lubaina Himid

Press release

The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on belonging, on how one settles, adapts, and remakes the idea of home in unfamiliar terrain. The pavilion traces the experience of navigating life away from one's origins, describing a process shaped as much by uncertainty as by discovery. As the title implies, history resists prediction, and translation — whether cultural, personal, or linguistic — remains forever provisional. At its centre is a new body of large-scale, multi-panel paintings, saturated with colour and charged with dreamlike imagery. These scenes, poised somewhere between the theatrical and the uncanny, extend Himid's long-standing interest in narrative and staging. The exhibition responds directly to the British Pavilion itself. Its neoclassical architecture becomes part of the work's language, reframed by Himid as a space of openness and possibility. Yet beneath this apparent welcome lies a subtle unease. Sound, text and imagery introduce dissonant notes, complicating any easy reading of Britain as a place of uncomplicated refuge. Curator: Ese Onojeruo. Commissioner: British Council.