Zarina Bhimji (b. 1963)
Shadows and Disturbances
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 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Zarina Bhimji, 2012 (detail illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern.

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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. Shadows and Disturbances was one of seven works which represented the artist at the Turner Prize and was subsequently shown at her landmark solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2012. The large-scale photographs presented at the exhibition were taken while researching and travelling for her film, Yellow Patch (2011), which addresses trade and migration across the Indian Ocean, and debuted in tandem with the show.The film documents striking landscapes and architecture accompanied by sounds of nature: thunder, footsteps, birdsong and rainfall. Yet from these spaces people are conspicuously absent, allowing the spaces to take on a poetic resonance in their scale.

In Shadows and Disturbances, Bhimji captures the entrance of an abandoned architectural structure: a wooden door illuminated by rays of sun-light. Although the space is vacant and empty, there is a strong element of human presence. The artist’s intention is to capture an abandoned space which tells the story of the characters that have inhabited it before. ‘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).

Shadows and Disturbances is one of our sale specialist, Amanda Lo Iacono’s, sale highlights. Read more about this piece and her other picks here.

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