Another Chance Encounter, an exhibition of new works by Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska, running from 12 July to 2 November 2025.

Inspired by the Kettle’s Yard house and collection, the exhibition is centred around the artists’ longstanding interests in occluded and marginal narratives, illuminating the figures and objects that have been left out of historical records.

Himid and Stawarska present a new multimedia installation inspired by the partial surviving correspondence between the writer and poet Sophie Brzeska and artist Nina Hamnett, published in Brzeska’s book Matka. This new work, titled Slightly Bitter (2025), comprises sonic elements, found objects, paintings bearing phonetic text and postcards from Himid and Stawarska’s own archives, weaving together imagined fragments from Brzeska and Hamnett’s impassioned exchanges in 1917-1918, of which only Brzeska’s letters survive. The installation offers a creative interpretation of the relationship between the two twentieth-century artists, often presented as footnotes to the story of the modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, to whom Sophie Brzeska was a long-term companion (he adopted her name, though they never married) and with whom Hamnett is speculated to have had an affair. Hamnett’s anonymous immortalisation as Gaudier-Brzeska’s marble Torso (1913) and bronze Dancer (1913), displayed in the Kettle’s Yard house, has slightly obscured her own artistic identity, while Brzeska is remembered primarily for her work to champion her partner’s legacy.

The sound element of Slightly Bitter is a four-channel composition layering fragments of the letters of Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska with additional fragments describing her in Nina Hamnett’s autobiography, Laughing Torso. The text is read in an RP English accent by Lubaina and in accented English by Magda, interspersed with segments of the Polish translation and phrases in French.

The quadrophonic composition, placing the voices and phrases around the room, wraps the visitor in the broken narrative. The listener must focus and listen carefully to understand the thread, whilst also tuning into its musicality, particularly in the sections where the artists practise the pronunciation of each other’s language.  

The piece is not linear; it plays on a loop, and it can be encountered at any point. What they hear during their stay is left to chance.

Sweet Sharp Taste of Limes (2025)

Stawarska’s sound intervention in the Kettles Yard house, plays from the kitchen, the visitor is confronted by sounds recorded there, the cutting of flowers for the house display, the amplified ticking of a clock, overlapped with sounds of the artist’s own kitchen, making coffee, chopping vegetables. To convey to the listener an idea of how intimate the space can be, the 15-minute sound composition is interrupted for a couple of minutes by Lubaina’s voice reading On a Night of the Full Moon by Audre Lorde.

https://www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk/whats-on/lubaina-himid/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/11/lubaina-himid-has-a-chance-encounter-and-ai-weiwei-takes-to-the-streets-the-week-in-art

https://www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk/stories/5-things-about-another-chance-encounter/

https://www.wallpaper.com/art/exhibitions-shows/lubaina-himid-and-magda-stawarska-interview

Give, take and make it up

https://thewickculture.com/the-wick-list-viewing-lubaina-himid-with-magda-stawarska-another-chance-encounter-at-kettles-yard/