Lubaina Himid

The kind of slight shock, I think, on the part of the ICA establishment then, that there were so many young black people in this space engaging with this work, all our friends and our families who were other things, filmmakers, musicians, whatever.

And the sort of aggression, there was a kind of aggression from critics.

There was a dismissal from the art establishment, but there was a sense of real, I don't know, fighting spirit on behalf of the artists.

And we used that corridor that we had to talk to each other and to make ourselves visible.

So the work was not shown in the main gallery, it was shown on... Yes, there's a sort of corridor between the foyer and the bar.

No, I was into taking over the entire place, you know, with film staff and performance and all sorts of things.

But I'm one of those people that I got offered a thing...

I said what I wanted and they said, no, you can't have that.

You can have this.

And I'm more the sort of person who thinks, OK, I'm going to take this and make the most of it that I can make.

We were kind of active before they were active, but I think we were pushing our own agenda.

You know, we were interested in being artists, making a kind of...

about what our personal slash political lives were like, and we didn't know anything about selling work.

And that, in a sense, was what divides us from the YBAs, is that they absolutely understood, because of the way they were taught, they understood the nature of the market, and we didn't.

We were interested in showing rather than selling.

So we were making an impact...

in a completely different way.

It wasn't really a competition.

Yeah, I don't think we... I mean, you'd have to ask them, but I don't think we were thinking, can we sell this drawing?

We were thinking, how good is this drawing?