Zarina Bhimji (b. 1963)
Ambivalence
Ilfochrome Ciba Classic Print
48 x 60¾in. (121.8 x 154.4cm.)
Executed in 2007, this work is number one from an edition of four plus two artist's proofs

PROVENANCE

Haunch of Venison, London.

EXHIBITED

Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, Turner Prize 2007, 2007-2008.

LITERATURE

Zarina Bhimji, exh. cat., Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2012 (detail illustrated in colour, unpaged).

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SPECIALIST NOTES

Nominated for the 2007 Turner Prize, British artist Zarina Bhimji’s photographs of the landscape and architecture of her native Uganda are near painterly compositions, suffused with light and texture. ‘My work always starts on a visual level,’ Bhimji explains, ‘it’s to do with light, texture and composition and of atmosphere and intimacy’ (Z. Bhimji, quoted in ‘Zarina Bhimji’s World Without People’, [accessed 28 July 2015]).

Bhimji’s images translate texture, presenting a multi-layered combination of her own social, political and cultural observations. Bhimji’s intention is to allow the viewer an insight into these now deserted places in order to raise an awareness of her sociological concerns. Bhimji’s artistic practice seeks to investigate these different ways of thinking and to respond to them through her works of art. However, rather than presenting people directly she allows the viewer to imagine and, in so doing, create the people that inhabited her abandoned spaces.

Bhimji’s work is certainly influenced by her background and her early experiences of having to flee her homeland. The artist recalls a specific influential moment when she went to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and observed women protesting in a non-violent form, by hanging their children’s clothes on barbed wire. ‘Looking back,’ Bhimji recalled, ‘it was the mix of ethical and intellectual reflections that stayed throughout my career as an artist’ (Z. Bhimji, quoted in K. Buehler and A. Borchardt-Hume, From Politics to Poetry, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, 2012, p. 1).

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