Zarina Bhimji
Zarina Bhimji is a photographer, filmmaker and installation artist who creates poetic visual works that reflect on ideas of identity, belonging, and displacement. Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Bhimji moved to Britain in 1974, two years after the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community under the military dictatorship of Idi Amin. Following a foundation year at Leicester Polytechnic (1982-83), Bhimji studied at Goldsmith’s College (1983-86) – where Mary Kelly was one of her tutors – and undertook a postgraduate degree in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art, London (1987-89). Bhimji’s work is historically aligned with other diasporic British artists who are interested in exploring the politics of race and gender, including Mona Hatoum, Donald Rodney, Sutapa Biswas, Simone Alexander and Veronica Ryan. Notably, Bhimji exhibited alongside these artists in Rasheed Araeen’s 1988 exhibition ‘The Essential Black Art,’ and in Veronica Ryan’s exhibition, ‘Dislocations,’ at Kettle’s Yard in 1987. Bhimji’s photographic and moving image works use bodily and architectural imagery to think through the legacies of colonial histories in relation to testimony and trauma. Her work is noteworthy for its intensely alluring visuality, where multiple meanings can be read or resisted, and the absence and presence of the human body is negotiated. Bhimji was one of the first artists to loan a work to the collection during its formation in 1992, and was the Kettle’s Yard artist in residence in partnership with Darwin College between 1992-1993. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007.
