Nominated for the Turner prize in 2007, a participant at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, Uganda-born, London-educated and highly-awarded Zarina Bhimji’s is not a name many Indians are familiar with. Yet, the artist — or, actually, photographer — isn’t without distinction. I chanced upon her name in a column in FT’s How To Spend It that quoted the Whitechapel Gallery’s Iwona Blazwick as saying that she hoped to pick up an edition of a work by “a photographer who is a bit under the radar”. “Indian” photographers don’t often merit attention in the UK press, far less among discriminating collectors or curators, so Bhimji — who won the New York International Center for Photography’s Infinity Prize in 2003 — must have registered her presence forcefully among the cognoscenti. Not that she’s a star — yet. Maybe it was just coincidence that the Whitechapel Gallery was organising a show by Bhimji, one the media was quick to dub “successful”.
Bhimji, correctly, is someone whose work, shall one say, is being “watched”. Part of the reason is the zeitgeist surrounding her life — or, rather, her family’s life. Her ancestors left Indian shores to go and work in Zanzibar, from where the family moved next to Uganda, where a number of Indians had sought their fortunes, and where Zarina was born in 1963. But Idi Amin’s crackdown on Indians saw the family fleeing and finding shelter in England, where the Bhimjis have since settled. “We arrived in Britain not speaking any English,” Bhimji has been quoted as saying.
Zarina Bhimji set out on another journey of her own, travelling to India and Zanzibar and Uganda. “She’s looking at how they went from their roots in India to Africa,” Blazwick said memorably, though Bhimji’s pictures speak evocatively of walls as reservoirs of stories, almost imbued with a life as observers of human dramas, happinesses and — something that seeps through her work — sorrows. Architectural sites, forsaken homes, discarded furniture, the spoils of lives, these have been her subjects sepiaed not in tones of regret as much as in notes of despair. These melancholic narratives speak of rudely uprooted lives and a passage of time indifferent to the unspeakable horror of violence — such as when she and her sister were forced to escape from Uganda.
What sets Bhimji’s work apart is her detachment from the visual aesthetic. She trains her eye on the poignance and hollowness of architecture which many regard as monuments of a heroic past; Bhimji imbues it with tragedy, removing any allusions to grandness in her account. It is a courage few photographers have as yet shown in India, focusing, as they mostly do, on the decorative over the documentative. Painful as these images are, they address and hook the viewer with a persuasive sense of regret.
Bhimji’s work in India resorted to evocative images of Gujarat’s coastal shipyards, or the ornate doorways and windows of ancient Kutch houses now reduced to crumbling plaster. In 2011, she returned to Mumbai and Gujarat to shoot for Yellow Patch, a film that takes forward her engagement with bare, derelict spaces in stages of ruin and decay.
Editions of her prints that deal with such spaces are currently at least affordable, but as Bhimji unflinchingly zooms in on the devastation of once-lived and loved rooms and walls, it is a matter of time before they touch a nadir. Indians, meanwhile, should look out for these editions, for in converging on themes of abandonment and migration, she is cutting close to the skin in a country that has kept an artistic silence over the world’s largest migration. Perhaps it is time that Bhimji starts unravelling the yarn.
Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated
