Conversation with Zarina Bhimji

Abstract

Recently I engaged in conversation with Zarina Bhimji, one of the five artists participating in Who Knows Tomorrow. Bhimji was born in Mbarara, Uganda, in 1963. Of Asian ancestry, she moved with her family to England as a child, following the expulsion of Asian-Ugandans by the Idi Amin regime in the early 1970s. She trained at the Goldsmiths College (1983–86) and the Slade School of Art, London (1987–89). She lives in London.A photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist, Bhimji uses bodily and architectural imagery as well as the landscape to explore history, memory, and the psychogeography of postcolonial Africa and Europe. Her spaces often evince a feeling of desolation and pathos, even as they insinuate suppressed histories of violence inscribed on walls and floors, in abandoned furniture coated with grime and dust, or in smashed, cobwebbed windows and interiors. The power of Bhimji's work lies in its intensely seductive pictoriality, seamlessly combined with the tragic melancholy of troubled histories. While the human body is present as unsentimental, lifeless object in her Collection of Charing Cross Hospital (1995), it is often hauntingly absent in the bare rooms, dilapidated houses, rundown tenements, or abandoned factories in Love (1998–2006), Waiting (2007), and other works. Her masterpiece, the powerful Out of Blue (2002), commissioned for Documenta 11, is a poetic meditation on the human condition through landscapes and interior spaces bearing marks of past violence, and thus simultaneously evokes the sublime and horrid violence emblematized no less by the genocides in Kosovo and Rwanda in the 1990s. A fierce advocate of the poetic image, Bhimji nevertheless insistently imposes on her photographs and films an ineluctable sense of tragic wonder, with the result that they become not just works of art but also archives of modernity's dark moments and humanity's incomplete, perhaps even impossible visions of progress. In this conversation, we explore her career and creative process, her constant and complex negotiation between form and content, the role of the archive in the making of her recent work, and her participation in Who Knows Tomorrow.