Lead White
Zarina Bhimji’s work explores colonialism and its legacies. Lead White is an installation comprised of embroideries and photographs: a conceptual autopsy on the body of colonised Africa. The photographs are enlarged images of documental fragments from the Zanzibar archive and focus on correspondence related to the 1884–85 Berlin Conference. This is when the partition of Africa was agreed between the European countries and marked the beginning of colonialism. Europeans for the first time moved inland in the continent and embarked on Africa’s rich land exploitation and its people’s violent subjugation. By the early 20th century, Africa was under European rule, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia.
The impact of colonialism extended even after the oppressors’ departure, as its after effect engendered bloody civil wars and armed conflicts; one of the most horrific examples being the Rwandan civil war which led to the Tutsi genocide and the killing of 20% of the whole Rwandan population. As a matter of fact, Bhimji’s family were expulsed from Uganda in 1972 in the wake of Idi Amin’s terror reign. They were part of a large Indian population who had initially moved to Uganda by the British Empire to assist with the Ugandan Railway construction.
‘Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.’ [i]
In a world replete with shocking images, one can get used to them. Horrific events that take place far away or do not involve us can be met with indifference; the repetition of images of cruelty can desensitize us. Internet and social media bombard viewers with violent images and the rapid succession of the real and the fictional, as well as mashups and the extensive use of photoshop, have now made indiscernible what is real and what is fake. Moreover, photos can be used and reused under different captions from different ideological groups, gaining new meanings and audiences.
Bhimji’s ‘work is not about the actual facts but about the echo they create, the marks, the gestures and the sound.’ [ii] Bhimji’s images don’t haunt us in the manner emblematic pictures do. Instead of prose, she chooses poetry and she talks through absence. It’s the aura and the atmosphere that obliquely unravel the stories, while she presents us with jigsaw pieces that can leave the inattentive mind puzzled.
Even her films incline towards landscape and architecture photography. They are meditative and lyrical, floating over empty spaces and deserted landscapes, evoking the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bella Tar. The subjects, the spaces and the places are all enwrapped in elusiveness. Every crack on the wall tells a story, holes become words and the narrative slowly unfolds through time. Her work brings in mind the writer W.G Sebald who approached evocatively one of the most painful and gruesome parts of history, the Holocaust. This is where both Sebald and Bhimji converge. They portray memory through beauty which can be found in the grimmest of places. They don’t capture the moment, don’t pursue the iconic, the memorable, or the fascinating, but in a contemplative manner, they follow traces and study fragments, mull over the events’ aftermath, telling the story through parallels.
Bhimji’s camera does not just direct our gaze, it also becomes a magnifier, focusing on the minuscule, the trivial and the overlooked, reminiscent of a passage in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. The narrator talks about his last visit in the nocturnal animal section of a zoo:
‘…all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.’[iii]
i. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, USA 2003, eBook edition 2013, p.55;
ii. Lead White, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London, November–June 2019, p. 124;
iii. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell, Germany 2001, 2011 Modern Library Trade Paperback E p.18
