A museum show at the Modern Art Museum of Luxembourg featuring new and rarely seen works, this exhibition is the first full scale European survey presenting the collaborative artistic practice of Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska.

Conceived as a performance, the exhibition emerges from a decade-long dialogue between British painter Lubaina Himid (1954, Zanzibar), a leading figure of the British Black Arts Movement, and multi-disciplinary Polish artist Magda Stawarska (1976, Ruda Śląska, Poland), whose practice combines moving image, soundscapes and screen printing.

In their exhibition 'Nets for Night and Day' composed by Dr Omar Kholeif, memory unfolds as a score narrated through paintings and drawings, as well as sculpture, silkscreen printing, photography and sound installation.

Visitors find themselves on a journey aboard ships, venturing across carts, ambling into dreamscapes rendered by the artists’ and their collective imagination.

At the heart of the exhibition is a newly imagined presentation of Zanzibar (1999–2023). The nine diptychs by Himid composing this ‘series of paintings about a series of journeys’ float suspended rhythmically in space and enter in dialogue with a 38-minute sound piece conceived by Stawarska as a ‘libretto’ for the paintings. Each of them, an abstraction at first, present codified clues into Himid’s life.

Associated with sound fragments that evoke her personal history, Zanzibar reflects on the multifaceted notions of belonging, loss and memory.