What We Carry We Cannot Leave: Artists in Response to the British Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale

This panel takes Lubaina Himid’s Predicting History: Testing Translation exhibition, staged for the British Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia as a point of departure, to consider how belonging is constructed, negotiated, and felt. Expanding on Dorothy Price’s reading of ‘dwelling’ in her exhibition catalogue essay, Himid moves from architecture and the spaces we live in, to everyday practices, clothing, food, and cultivation, as ways of shaping how bodies inhabit the world.

Across her work, dwelling becomes an active, collective process: something made and remade through labour, care, and imagination. The figures that populate her paintings propose different models for how we might live, not in isolation, but in relation to others and to the environments we occupy.

Bringing together artists Ṣọlá Olúlòde, Pio Abad, and Mohammed Z. Rahman, whose practices are shaped by migration, shared histories, and the afterlives of colonial systems, this discussion, chaired by Esé Onojeruo, Shane Ackroyd Associate Curator of the British Pavilion, explores three interconnected concerns: intimacy, collective action, and world-building.

Rather than offering fixed answers, the panel opens a space for dialogue, reflecting their own approach: staging possibilities, unsettling assumptions, and inviting us to rethink what it means to make a home.

This event is organised by Professor Dorothy Price FBA, Executive Dean and Deputy Director, and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, Courtauld Institute of Art