British artist Zarina Bhimji makes photographs, films and installations which engage with themes such as institutional power and subjectivity. Her work grows from observation and felt sense and is rooted in a careful use of colour and light. Embracing slippages and ambiguities, it is evocative rather than descriptive or documentary in its pace, setting and mood.
The exhibition spans Bhimji’s career. It begins with She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (1987), a photo-text installation that explores politics, voice, beauty and love as forms of resistance. This is joined by her most recent work, a new film, Blind Spot (2023). Shot in London this summer, it engages with ideas of home. Also included in the exhibition is Bhimji’s first film, Out of Blue (2002), an allusive exploration of the extermination and erasure of particular groups by a state; and Waiting (2007), an atmospheric wander around a stilled factory that processed sisal into twine.
Bhimji is motivated by art’s ability to re-make experience in the mind of the viewer:
If I can’t make an object that describes a dusty room so someone else understands what it feels like to be in that room, then I’ve failed’. She wants to move people, and to tap into a way of thinking that is not embedded in words. Her art communicates with the urgency that comes from working something out for yourself, rather than having been told what and how to think. Yet beauty is her principal method: ‘when you create something beautiful, you’re taking charge.
A new book accompanies the exhibition. With an essay by Allison K Young and a conversation between Zarina Bhimji and novelist Kamila Shamsie, it extends the reach and range of the exhibition.
Fiona Bradley said:
Zarina Bhimji makes exceptional work. Beautiful, powerful and urgent, with a palpable emotional charge, it brings the unspeakable into the light and makes space for us to contemplate it. Zarina has showed at the Fruitmarket before, most notably in the touring group exhibition ‘From Two Worlds’ in 1986. I am proud now to work with her on this major solo exhibition.
ABOUT ZARINA
Zarina Bhimji, born in Mbarara, Uganda, 1963, is a British artist who lives and works in London. Bhimji received a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a MA in Fine Art from the Slade, University College London. She was DAAD’s Artist-in-Residence 2002, exhibited in the 2002 edition of documenta, the Venice Biennale in 2003 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007. Awards include the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 1999 and the Rauschenberg Residency award, 2014; Bhimji was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 2020-21. She has had solo institutional exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery (2012), Tate Britain (2018) and Sharjah Art Foundation (2020).
28.10.23 – 28.01.24
Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market St, Edinburgh EH1 1DF