The State We're In, 2000-Now
Main Floor | Room 28
Ongoing

Himid’s 2021 painting H.M.S. Calcutta is now on view at the Tate Britain in a group presentation of works titled “The State We’re In 2000-Now.”

From Artforum:

“In one corner, The State We’re In, A, 2015, a huge photograph of the Atlantic Ocean by Wolfgang Tillmans, hangs next to Lubaina Himid’s H.M.S. Calcutta, 2021, a reimagining of James Tissot’s 1876 painting of the same name. Himid replaces Tissot’s three white figures with two black women in colorful modern dress, the waves beyond them choppy and rough, like those that dominate Tillmans’s inkjet print, with just a slim horizontal of gray sky visible above the dark waters. In both works, the vastness of the sea, its long horizon, beckons, overwhelms, terrifies, dazzles, promises—what? Something we’re looking for, something we still can’t see. A country fluid and in flux, an island nation defined in so many ways by the tides, real and conceptual, that ebb and flow around it.”