‘As an artist a curator and as a teacher I am interested in the act, the art and the challenge of remembering and forgetting’, Lubaina Himid says: ‘It is important to remember so that others do not forget, but the act of remembering usually means that one offends a section of society who would rather forget’. While she is adamant in her instructions to any would-be memorialists of African diasporic histories – ‘Ignore this and remember anyway’ – she remains insistent: ‘Both remembering and not forgetting need to be accompanied by a huge sloshy helping of forgiving, without forgiving remembering is bitter, sour, unpalatable and even poisonous’. She is equally under no illusion that ‘[i]f you cannot forgive you might as well forget’.

For Himid, the art of remembering and the act of forgiving have continued to define her practice over the decades. ‘As an artist I have attempted to remember African artists who have lost their lives as a result of being snatched, shipped and forced into slavery or those who have been held restricted demoralised and browbeaten into working for almost nothing in factories and mills’, she declares. ‘I need to do it because there are stories that need to be told. There are stories that aren't being told. There are gaps in history that are not being filled’, she observes; ‘I only know how to paint. So rather than being a politician or a historian then that's what I do’.

‘It's easy to think of slaves as “over there”, “back then” or as “victims” as “faceless” as “numbers”’, Himid concedes; ‘The point is slaves were and are people’. ‘They have and had names and feelings, thoughts and even strange through it may seems, hopes and dreams, memories and an innate creativity’. Over the decades, she has waged war against all attempts to dehumanise, deny and distort the artistry and agency of enslaved African diasporic women, children and men. ‘I’m constantly trying to make room in these paintings for other people to be in them. That's where the dialogue happens’, Himid admits, emphasising that ‘[t]hat's why there are no pictures of bleeding or dying slaves lying about in the paintings, because no black people that I know would want to place themselves in that situation, and it simply fills a white European sensibility with a huge sense of guilt’.