Lubaina Himid's installation in the British Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2026

La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)Castello

British Pavilion: Predicting History: Testing Translation – Lubaina Himid

Last chance9 May 2026 – 22 November 2026€30

Lubaina Himid's large multi-panel paintings of architects, boatbuilders and tailors debating whether to move or stay probe belonging and making a home somewhere new.

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On now All of November 2026

You walk in and two women in Architects are debating. One, in an immense crinoline, holds a cylindrical model of a building. The other, in a fringed carnival costume, offers one on wheels, ready to leave. Stay or go: that question runs through all five of Lubaina Himid's multi-panel paintings.

Next to it, 26 questions on the wall run from "Do you want to go back to the old place?" to "Can flies settle here?" Tailors, Chefs, Boatbuilders and Gardeners fill the other rooms, and Magda Stawarska's soundtrack of seagulls and slapping rigging gives way to buzzing flies. One wall holds 21 mismatched oars painted with flowers, birds and talismans: in a city where oars still have a day job, these have retired.

Critics split. The Guardian's Eddy Frankel thought Himid had done this better before but credited the anxiety coursing through the rooms. The Independent found it "generously all-embracing". It's in the Giardini, covered by the €30 Biennale ticket, Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm, until 22 November.

Look for

The wall of 21 oars
Look for 21 mismatched found oars lined up along one wall, each overpainted with flowers, birds, talismans or geometric shapes.
Gardeners and the cactus
In adjacent panels one gardener overwaters a cactus while the other prods it with a hoe, under botanical illustrations blown up to giant scale.
Man in a Rope Drawer
Near Boatbuilders, a young man's face stares out from the bottom of a drawer projecting from the gallery wall, glancing towards the lagoon.
Chefs at the floating counter
Two figures stand side by side at a countertop that floats against dripping pink and turquoise, with patches of the canvas left deliberately unpainted.
Tailors in wax-print flowers
Huge stylised flowers drawn from African wax-print fabric spread across the panels, where an 18th-century frock coat sits alongside contemporary clothes.