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 Mohammad Rahman, whose practices are shaped by migration, shared histories, and the afterlives of colonial systems, this discussion 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, ĢƵ Institute of Art
With contributions from:
Pio Abad (1983; born in Manila; living and working in London). Pio Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political lives of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, installation, text and archival intervention, reconstructs and reanimates artifacts connected to suppressed or contested histories, often remaking them by hand through labour-intensive processes. These painstaking acts of translation become a form of inquiry and a tender gesture of solidarity, asking what it means to hold, inherit, or circulate the material evidence of violence, exile, and resistance.
Abad’s recent exhibitions include: In Interludes and Transitions / “في الحِلّ والترحال”, The 3rd Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh (2026); 2024 Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (2024); To Those Sitting in Darkness, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2024); Small World, The 13th Taipei Biennial, Taipei; Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila (2022). He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2024 and is currently exhibiting as part of In Minor Keys, The 61st Venice Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh.
Ṣọlá Olúlòdeis a British Nigerian artist living and working in South London. She received a BA in Fine Art Painting from the University of Brighton in 2018. Upon graduation she took part in the notable graduate show BBZ BLK BK: Alternative Graduate Show. 2018. She then went on to receive a graduate studio residency at Lewisham Art House for a year in London. Since then she has exhibited innumerous international group solo exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include solos: I’ve Got To Know You Now We May Never Meet Again Lawrie Shabibi. Dubai, 2025; Islands of the Blessed at Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London, 2024 and Could You Be Love, Sapar Contemporary, New York, 2022. Selected group shows include Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. DC, USA, 2026; Queer Love, Stephen Friedman, New York, 2025; Conversations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2024, Keeping Time, Gallery 1957, Accra, 2024; Dreaming of Home Leslie, Lohman Museum, New York, 2023; To Be Held at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, 2023; Womxn Of Colour Art Award 2020-2021 Finalists Exhibition: Altitude 198 Contemporary Arts, London, 2021; Victoria Miro x Out Collective, Vortic, 2021, An Infinity of Traces, Lisson Gallery, London, 2021; In Heavenly Blue Wunika Mukan, Lagos, 2022. She has been featured in ID Magazine, Art Review and Readers Digest and featured on the Hayward Gallery Billboard April 2024-2025.
Esé Onojeruo is a London-based curator, producer and cultural practitioner working across contemporary art, film, public programming and creative participation. Her practice explores how cultural institutions can create space for communities historically marginalised by dominant cultural and institutional structures, with a focus on collective knowledge, Black diasporic histories and alternative forms of cultural production.
She has worked with organisations including Tate, Royal Museums Greenwich, Chisenhale Gallery and South London Gallery, developing exhibitions, commissions, public programmes and participatory projects. She is co-founder of Narration Group, a collective for women and non-binary people of colour, and developed Curating Black Art with Black Blossom School of Art, examining the frameworks through which Black art is positioned and interpreted.
Alongside her curatorial practice, Onojeruo produces interdisciplinary film and moving-image projects, working with artists and filmmakers including Anthea Hamilton, Evan Ifekoya, Shamica Ruddock, Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah.
Mohammed Z Rahman (b.1997) is a British Bengali artist based in London working across visual art, installation and text. With a background in social anthropology, Rahman approaches his practice as both an intimate and political force. His work is concerned with migration, cultural hybridity, historical erasure, labour, queerness and class, articulated through a rich understanding of colour and form and distinct self-taught style. Recent exhibitions include the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2026), Tate Britain (2026), Whitechapel Gallery (2025), Peer Gallery (2025) and The Approach (2024), London. Rahman’s work is represented in the collections of Tate, UK, Government Art Collection, UK, LAM Museum, Netherlands, and Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.