Zarina Bhimji was born to Indian parents in Mbarara, Uganda in 1962. Her family moved to England as refugees during Uganda's expulsion of Asian residents in 1974, and Bhimji subsequently studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths' College and the Slade School of Fine Art. Her photography and installation work explore themes of race, terror and violence, earning her several major solo exhibitions and a nomination for the Turner Prize in 2007.
Photographer and installation artist, Zarina Bhimji was born to Indian parents in Mbarara, Uganda in 1962. In 1974, aged 12, Bhimji and her family joined the nearly 30,000 refugees who settled in the UK after President Idi Amin’s mass expulsion of Uganda’s Asian residents two years prior. Brought up in Leicester, England, her coming-of-age was framed by an era of xenophobic and anti-immigration campaigns of Conservative politicians, followed by a decade of austerity and ‘ethno-nationalist nostalgia’ under Margaret Thatcher (Young, 2021). Becoming interested in feminist and anti-racist activism as a teenager, in the early 1980s Bhimji visited Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a non-violent activist community protesting the establishment of an American nuclear base in Berkshire, west of London. The visually creative methods of the women, Bhimji reflected, ‘stayed with me throughout my career as an artist’ (Young 2021; Borchardt-Hume, 2012). She was educated at Leicester Polytechnic (1982–83), earned a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (1983–86) and a Higher Diploma in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1987–89). In 1989 she won the Slade’s Julian Sullivan Award for achievement in fine art media.
Working in photography and film installations, throughout the 1980s Bhimji was involved in the Black Art movement (Gant, 2015; Chambers, 2014). Her work featured in various group exhibitions which focused on Black and Asian interventions in art and photography, including Mirror Reflecting Darkly at Brixton Art Gallery, London (1985), Darshan: An Exhibition by Ten Asian Photographers at Camerawork, London (1986), and The Essential Black Art at Chisenhale Gallery, London (1988). Personal objects and mementoes often appeared in these early works as a way of exploring identity and place (Ratnam, 2005). Following her studies, Bhimji became a Visiting Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge (the institution's first all-graduate college) where she explored her own physical body and procedures associated with death and the dead. In 1990, she exhibited alongside Mumtaj Karimjee, Nudrat Afze and Pradipta Das in the second instalment of the four-part exhibition series, In Focus, organised by the Indian Arts Council at their Horizon Gallery, London. Two years later, Bhimji held her first UK solo exhibition, Zarina Bhimji: I Will Always Be Here at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. The installation hung a mass of little white shirts from the gallery ceiling, each bearing evidence of violence in the form of partial burning: ‘They deal with loss and the experience and language of pain’, Bhimji remarked, ‘both of which have been important concepts to my work’ (Chambers, 2014).
In 1998 another solo exhibition, Cleaning the Garden, was held at the Terrace Gallery, Harewood House, Leeds, which would later tour as Bhimji’s first solo exhibition in the USA at Talwar Gallery, New York in 2001. The following year, she was commissioned by Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany (under artistic director, Okwui Enwezor) to produce Out of Blue, for which she returned to Uganda to film architecture, airports and graveyards, as well as the military barracks, police cells, and prisons of Amin’s reign of terror. She subsequently won the 2003 Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography (ICP, 2003). In 2005 Bhimji was selected for the British Art Show 6, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and its UK tour. Between 2003 and 2007 she travelled widely in India, East Africa and Zanzibar, studying legal documents and the stories of those who formed the British powerbase in those countries, interviewing and taking photographs. The resulting work was exhibited in Zarina Bhimji at Haunch of Venison in London and Zurich in 2006, culminating in a Turner Prize nomination the following year (Tate, 2007). Bhimji held her first major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2012. In 2018 the Sharjah Art Foundation and Arts Council England co-sponsored an exhibition of Bhimji’s documentary exploration of Zanzibar, Lead White at Tate Britain. Consisting of over 100 unframed photographs and multiple embroideries, this was the culmination of a decade-long investigation conducted over multiple continents, exploring power and beauty through national archives and the way they categorise and reveal institutional ideologies. The work combined digital outputs and physical crafts, including embroidery for the first time in the artist’s practice (Gallagher, 2018).
Zarina Bhimji lives and works in London. Her practice has received significant attention from scholars working on decolonising art history, such as Alice Correia, Eddie Chambers and Allison K. Young. Her work is held in the UK public domain in the Tate Collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Zarina Bhimji]
Publications related to [Zarina Bhimji] in the Ben Uri Library