Radhika Kapila

Casting shadows

Zarina Bhimji is a photographer of ghosts. Her images of deserted buildings (‘Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over’, above) and desolate landscapes are empty, but haunted by humanity; her work is, as she puts it, evidence not of ‘actual facts but the echo they create’.

The Whitechapel Gallery is currently home to a retrospective of the work of this Turner Prize-nominated artist (until 9 March), and includes a selection of her photographs, installations and short films. Bhimji and her family were forced to leave Uganda when Idi Amin expelled Asians from the country in 1972 and much of her work bears the imprint of this background. Her images of East Africa and India explore the vast issues created by displacement and forced exile.   

Gaping rooms, flaking paint, shadows cast across patterned shutters; all these images tell a story — but a secret story — one that we can sense, yet have no explanation for. The photographs of dilapidated buildings bearing traces of past grandeur come as close as possible to showing the flow of time within a still image. This sense of historical movement is also felt in the film Yellow Patch, which depicts the history of trade between India and Africa. It is rhythmically unsettling, as images and sounds disconnect from one another, creating a troubling undertone of dislocation.

The evocation of loss in Bhimji’s work is created by the feeling that every one of her spaces is saturated with memories — but these are memories that viewers can never fully know.

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