Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter

Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter
12th July, 2025 – 2nd November, 2025
Kettle’s Yard
Castle Street
Cambridge
CB3 0AQ

Exploring Hidden Histories Through Sound, Paint, and Place: A Collaborative Exhibition by Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska at Kettle’s Yard

Kettle’s Yard is delighted to present Another Chance Encounter, an exhibition of new works by Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska, running from 12 July – 2 November 2025. Inspired by the Kettle’s Yard house and collection, the exhibition is centred around the artists’ longstanding interests in occluded and marginal narratives, illuminating the figures and objects that have been left out of historical records.

Lubaina Himid is known for a pioneering painting practice that addresses themes of race, history, feminism, cultural memory, and identity. She frequently employs storytelling and historical research to challenge dominant Eurocentric narratives and highlight the overlooked contributions of marginalised figures in Western history. Magda Stawarska’s multi-disciplinary practice combines moving image, sound, traditionally made silkscreen prints, and paintings on paper. She examines how rhythms in sound affect our ability to decode the visual; how the process of what she describes as “inner listening” to a soundscape impacts the ability to understand one’s personal relationship to a place.

Over the past decade, the two artists have developed a rich collaborative practice that combines painting, printmaking, sound, and installation. Characterised by a seamless integration of their distinct artistic practices, they create immersive environments which invite viewers to reflect on interwoven complex narratives.

The exhibition will feature a major new cycle of paintings by Himid, collectively titled How May I Help You? (2025). The canvases build upon Himid’s paintings of vendors and tradespeople in her recent series, Street Sellers (2024), lending visibility to the men whom Jim and Helen Ede may have seen and spoken to during their time in Tangiers from 1936 to 1952. Several large, full-length portraits of shopkeepers and their customers at the threshold of their establishments, engaged in intimate verbal exchanges about life, love, and the beauty of objects, will encourage visitors to imagine these fleeting moments of sharing and desire.

The exhibition will further include a new large-scale painting by Himid for the Kettle’s Yard house, which references the everyday purchases that Jim and Helen Ede may have made during their stay in North Africa. This will be accompanied by subtle painted and printed interventions by Himid and Stawarska in drawers and behind closed doors. In Himid’s work, domestic spaces and objects act as intimate containers of forgotten lives and lost memories, a sensibility which resonates with the spirit of Kettle’s Yard and its dedication to the modest, yet remarkable, traces of everyday life. A new sound work by Stawarska will be installed within the kitchen of the Kettle’s Yard house, quietly resonating as visitors pass by.

An additional display in the Kettle’s Yard Research Space will explore Himid’s 1989 series, The Ballad of the Wing, which presents a fictional collection of Black cultural objects, critiquing the role of museums in the selective preservation, denial, and stewardship of cultural memory.

Alongside Another Chance Encounter, a community project will develop a series of curtains based on new and never-before-seen paintings by Himid, installed in Arbury in North Cambridge.

Another Chance Encounter is curated by Dr Amy Tobin, Curator, Contemporary Programmes at Kettle’s Yard. A new fully illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring texts by Amy Tobin, Amelia Groom, and Aneta Krzemien in conversation with Magda Stawarska, as well as a selection of Himid’s own writings.

At Kettle’s Yard, Himid and Stawarska will also present a new multimedia installation inspired by the partial surviving correspondence between the writer and poet Sophie Brzeska and artist Nina Hamnett, published in Brzeska’s book Matka. This new work, titled Slightly Bitter (2025), will comprise sonic elements, found objects, paintings bearing phonetic text, and postcards from Himid and Stawarska’s own archives, weaving together imagined fragments from Brzeska and Hamnett’s impassioned exchanges in 1917–1918, of which only Brzeska’s letters survive.

The installation will offer a creative interpretation of the relationship between the two twentieth-century artists, often presented as footnotes to the story of the modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, to whom Sophie Brzeska was a long-term companion (he adopted her name, though they never married) and with whom Hamnett is speculated to have had an affair. Hamnett’s anonymous immortalisation as Gaudier-Brzeska’s marble Torso (1913) and bronze Dancer (1913), displayed in the Kettle’s Yard house, has slightly obscured her own artistic identity, while Brzeska is remembered primarily for her work to champion her partner’s legacy.

Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter opens on the 12th of July, 2025 until the 2nd of November, 2025 at Kettle’s Yard

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©2025 Kettle’s Yard

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