Polish born and UK based multidisciplinary artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan works with sound, moving image and print, and is a longstanding collaborator with Lubaina Himid. Originally trained in theatrical design, Himid has been a leading figure in the British Black arts movement since the 1980s, and her paintings and installation works – soundtracked by Stawarska-Beavan ­– are the subject of a major show at Tate Modern, London. These include Blue Grid Test, an installation connecting Joni Mitchell, the sea, domestic music making and intimate linguistic play in several languages, and Naming The Money, where Himid tells the stories of several enslaved people, her words set to Baroque music and jazz – a piece that was originally presented with the stories affixed to the back of wooden cutouts, painted as portraits. Himid and Stawarska-Beavan reworked the piece for the Tate Modern exhibition, replacing the figures with sound. In this interview Stawarska-Beavan discusses her approach to creating the sound for the exhibition, and how the two artists work together to create immersive, socially engaging experiences.

Emily Bick: You and Lubaina Himid have been collaborators for seven years now. How did you start working together, and become such close collaborators?

Magda Stawarska-Beavan: We have known each other for quite a long time, over ten years. We worked together at university. Apart from working with sound. I work with print as well, and Lubaina came to make prints with me. And in the past, I also used Lubaina's voice in my own sound work. We have known each other quite well for quite a long time.

EB: Naming The Money was the first big project that you worked on together for an installation, is that right?

MSB: Yes, 2017 was when that exhibition took place.

EB: It's a really different format in this presentation at Tate Modern, without the wooden cutouts, and with the soundtrack surrounding you. It's a different staging. How did you decide to arrange it this way?

MSB: Probably it started from the practical reason that Lubaina didn't really want to show a hundred cutouts in the Tate Modern, in that space. In a way, by focusing on the sound, you were still able to imagine, maybe not the cutout itself, the figure, but sort of see those people's lives. In that space, to have the soundtrack for Naming The Money was a decision. How do we try to make the audience feel that they are actually surrounded by people? The decision was made to put the speakers on the height of the ear, which is the height of a person. And then when a person is walking through, it feels like an encounter, there is another person speaking to them. Of course, it's such a long soundtrack, and the music changes so much that different people will have so much different experiences walking through that space.

EB: It's more of a litany or a list set to a Baroque soundtrack, and then it's more free with the way that the people’s stories are interspersed with the playing in the John Coltrane sections.

MSB: Yes.

EB: How did you find the places where the text and spoken sections would go? I mean, what was the collaboration, the negotiation of that?

MSB: Lubaina's one of those people who gives you a lot of freedom. She trusts the collaborator to use their own aesthetic interpretation. So I really tried to listen to the music to find a spot where there was a moment of tension. I listened and let the cello play a little tune and then I placed Lubaina's voice. And at other times I would make slightly longer gaps between words to go with the jazz music. I try to work in response to the music and the voice and the text.

I really like what the architecture [in Tate Modern] is doing to the piece. I tweak it independently to make it work in the space. I think we both were really happy how it took over the space, and how I think Lubaina really wanted the space to feel a little bit like outside. And make it feel like it was a space between – you finished looking at the paintings, and you have that moment of contemplation before you go out, but you feel like you are outside the exhibition in a way because of the light and in the space. You are digesting what you have seen and you still are full of memories of what you have seen.

EB: Yes, it's a really brilliant way of ending the exhibition, because you go through this whole staging, first from the front room, which is more domestic and intimate and then as you progress you have the larger set of rooms with all of the paintings, the wagons, all of the cardboard cutouts. It's such a riot of colour and story and very powerful. And then you're at the end with Naming The Money. Then finally you see this bus shelter, and are confronted with that question painted on it which is also its title: "Do You Want An Easy Life". You can't not engage with it.

MSB: That's right.

EB: My other question about that particular piece [Naming The Money] and about some of the others inside is that some of the works are labeled as soundtracks, but because the context of the art that's presented with them, and how pieces are staged changes, Do you think that that changes the way that they should be named? Do you think they should be called soundtracks if the visual content changes? Or the staging changes. Do they ever feel like separate pieces? I think with soundtracks, there is this connotation that a soundtrack can be detached from the work that it accompanies – these are so completely embedded into the work.

MSB: Hmm. I'm wondering. Maybe especially in the early pieces, like Naming The Money, when Lubaina was creating cutouts, she wasn't maybe thinking of the sound at the same time. I think in a way that recording the voice was thought of later – because, of course, each figure has the text at the back. And I think she wanted to make the viewers who don't want to read, to be able to hear it. So in a way, its sound, at the beginning, was a solution to something. But I think as the work developed, it became an integral part. And I do agree with you. Maybe sometimes the reason why she also addresses it as a soundtrack is because she wants to credit my work in it. She feels about it should be acknowledged. I think that's probably the reason why. And I think it’s slightly different. When in Blue Grid Test, Lubaina created a visual and I created the sound, but we were doing it at the same time. So it feels more like it is integral and a more directly collaborative piece as the Naming The Money, where the sound was created after the cutouts would have been made.

EB: I wanted to ask you about Blue Grid Test, about how you came to decide the orchestration of that one, mainly because the visuals are so strong with the allusions to jazz. And also there a banjo in part of the work on the gallery wall while the music is all piano.

MSB: It's true. Yes. Well, there's pianola as well.

EB: Okay, there's a pianola roll on the wall, too.

MSB: Lots of pieces, and wooden pieces from pianola. We were commissioned to do this piece for a group exhibition in Belgium and we were making it actually in the lockdown. And although we were in deep, lockdown, the University was closed, our main studios in the town also were closed, but Lubaina kindly gave me a studio in her house. So we were in the lockdown, we were spending time together. I think the first initial idea was to paint it on a piece of metal, on zinc, but somehow there were problems with delivery of the zinc and Lubaina just decided that she actually will use objects from her house and the store room, and to paint the blue pattern on. In the past, she painted on ready-made objects and I think in a way when the piece was developing, it was developing to be a quite nostalgic piece, and with a piece of music which was very romantic as well. I think in a way that the metal hadn't arrived was what created a much stronger piece.

We were listening to different music and we were thinking about having several different pieces of music, and then we just decided that the whole thing will become too complicated. What we're trying to achieve, to be looking at patterns in music. We had to decide on a piece, which would sort of graph together. Yeah, I think that's what happens when you're standing in the middle of that room. You just feel like something happens to you.

It's all to do with, I suppose, memory. So all those objects would be sort of everyday objects. But they all have some attachment to memory in the piece itself. And when she's talking about the blue colour, it's again in the memory of different blue, and different observations of how the paint behaves when you are using it in painting, or the kitchen of her Auntie Betty. And then the patterns on the objects communicate another set of codes from from different places. I was looking at the notation of the musical score of [Joni Mitchell’s] “Blue” and I was trying to use the pattern of stuff, visual pattern how the score is written down and and playing. So, where the word is blue. It's repeatedly said blue in different intonation, and sometimes it's whispered, sometimes it's loaded with different emotion. That's the left and right hand of the piano. And where they are full sentences, which are started from one speaker and sometimes finish on the speaker which is directly opposite, is where the voice of Joni Mitchell sings. And, of course, it's not recreating the actual melody, but in a way it's sort of trying to mimic a pattern in the music as well. Which corresponds to thinking about pattern and grids which are in the paintings.

EB: Again, as you move through that space, the voices, in English, French and Flemish, are also poised at a level that's near your ear. It's a very kind of direct correspondence, as you as you wander through, to move with the flow of the piece through different feelings.

MSB: Yes. I also quite like the layout of the room which was a little bit incidental, so that when you're standing in the middle you can actually see the horizon of the sea in one of the paintings of the Plan B series in the next room. Then you sort of realise that actually the word blue is also connected to the sea, which is all through the exhibition area. I think through the space there are nice moments when one piece relates to another piece, and it gives you that possibility to flow.

EB: It's like this constant connecting thread through the whole thing. In the main room you have the sounds from A Fashionable Marriage also playing in the corner, but the way it’s timed, different sections of the music for that piece will come on and then switch off. You can imagine that people going through the space only hear part of that or one section at a time and maybe a snippet of the other section.

MSB: It's every 20 minutes, and yeah, it sometimes takes a person by surprise. There are moments when maybe you will hear a louder music from Naming The Money at the same time. But everything lasts for a very short time like that and then you move into different moments.

EB: Lubaina had a beautiful quote about this which was that the whole exhibition is now a composition. And that really sums up what you're doing, because it's a combination of everything from theatrical design to all of the art, all of the paintings and everything that's in there together. It's every discipline, everything you can imagine. I would like to talk about the opening rooms, and just how people are introduced to this this whole experience. Because, when you enter the exhibition, the very first thing you hear is Reduce The Time Spent Holding, with Lubaina's voice reading out health and safety manual instructions, and the sounds of a workshop with tools. And that's also a theme through the exhibition: we're going to show you all of this fantastical immersive stuff, but also you show how everything is made. Was that part of the journey? I mean, making the production of the work something that's explicit.

MSB: I think that's that's often a part of Lubaina's work, that she never wants to hide. She wants to expose how things are being constructed and the same with, I suppose, how we present the speakers. We don't hide them. The wires are visible. And that sometimes it's impossible to hide them. That's another thing.

EB: They're right in front of your face.

MSB: [Reduce The Time Spent Holding] was composed for the New Museum in New York originally, and it was presented on headphones in the New Museum, but it's recorded, all the machinery and mechanical sounds. The man who was working the metal workshop at the university, I went to see him and I said, “Look, I would like to record some of your machines,” and he said, “Oh really?” and he was really happy that somebody was interested in what his machines sounded like. He was actually playing them. He was picking up scrap boards and was using different equipment to either drill or chop and so on. He was working with them, like he was playing instruments, and I think he was really, really happy that somebody was also thinking that actually those machines sound musical. And then we also made lots of different sounds in this studio Lubaina was at that time working in, Ben Nicholson's studio in St Ives, a big wooden open space.

So we're using scissors and and things which you’re using your hands to produce. And then of course, the voice was also recorded in Ben Nicholson's studio, where I put my binaural microphones on it, sat on the chair and ask Lubaina to either come and say those instructions really close to my ears or from different corners of the space. I wanted for the acoustics of that space to be transformed into and translated to the sound piece. And those very simple health and safety instructions, which are found in the guidance, when they are spoken in an intimate way, they sound like instructions of caring about somebody. Now sometimes they are more authoritarian, or in an assertive way. But you have to care about somebody or something.

So there's that dynamic of changing the meaning in those phrases. But also the voice, and the way it's spoken changes the way you listen to those mechanical sounds. And you start to think of them becoming, instead of being sounds which you feel that they are unpleasant, you develop a sort of different relationship to them. It's about elemental thinking, in a bigger picture those little sounds can also be comforting because the idea of that piece is about making your way out of any situation. in a creative way you can change, change your situation, change your life or work your way out of trauma as well.

Lubaina Himid at London Tate Modern continues until 2 October 2022.