LUBAINA HIMID
Predicting History: Testing Translation

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2026
Hardcover | 228 pages | $30 7 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches

This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies Predicting History: Testing Translation, LUBAINA HIMID's 2026 solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition was conceived in response to the British Pavilion’s neo-classical architecture, and features new works across media that lend lush visibility to issues of migration and belonging. Vast multi-panel canvases depict gardeners, chefs, architects, and others in the act of skilled creation, and a sound work (made with Magda Stawarska) engages national identity through samples of folk ballads and field recordings of local landscapes.

Other new paintings explore the communicative power of kanga cloth through their patterned surfaces, or use found boating oars as unconventional supports that connote displacement and tactile use. The catalogue documents the works in situ through installation photography and traces their making through studio ephemera, accompanied by original essays from acclaimed group of international scholars—including Dorothy Price, Zoé Whitley, Nick Aikens, and Christine Eyene—and an intimate dialogue with an artist.

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