Zarina Bhimji

Laudation for Zarina Bhimji on the occasion of the awarding of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, 29 November 2024 at Kunsthaus Zurich

Prof. Thomas Wagner | Check against delivery.

Dear Zarina Bhimji, honoured guests,

It is a great honour and an even greater pleasure for me to say a few words here today about the work of Zarina Bhimji. I must apologize for the fact that I can only address a small number of aspects of her so wondrously multifaceted art. I trust that some of what I can only touch upon will resonate with you, and encourage you to delve into the films that are being shown here at the Kunsthaus to mark the award ceremony, by courtesy of the artist and thanks to the dedication of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation.

"In a time of betrayal, the landscapes are beautiful." That is the last line of a poem written in the 1960s by the novelist and playwright Heiner Müller, who walked a delicate line between the systems of East and West. (It relates, incidentally, to Jamaica in 1799, and the export and failure of a revolution.)

"In a time of betrayal, the landscapes are beautiful." And just as beautiful, almost sublime, is the landscape that appears at the start of Zarina Bhimji's film "Out of the Blue", which was shown in 2002 at Documenta 11 in Kassel, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and which brought the artist to the attention of a wider audience.

In a seemingly meditative establishing scene, the camera pans across wooded hills shrouded in mist. Insects buzz, an instrument hums, women's voices can be heard. Shots ring out. Fire crackles. The mist reveals itself as smoke: the savannah is burning. At a stroke, blue has turned into red. The memory of traumatic events rises up from a landscape that - just about - still seems peaceful. Gradually, buildings appear that look like old military barracks. We find ourselves staring into abandoned rooms, former prison cells. Guns are lined up against the wall. Leftover testimonies to violence and imprisonment. Towards the end of the film, an airport can be seen, its derelict control tower bearing a sign with the inscription "Entebbe, 3789 ft". It is the airport from which many Asians (and later also Bhimji's family) fled during their expulsion from Uganda.

"Originally," the artist explains "the research began with my desire to understand the underlying history of the events in Uganda, but then I wanted to understand what the word "asylum" or the word 'stateless" means from a political and personal standpoint. From that I developed an idea of how I could communicate that feeling, and how I could enlarge it through sound and turn it into a rhythm."

The film unfolds layer by layer. The landscape, the light, the colours, the sounds, the locations, the spaces and the slow, almost stately movement of the camera's eye all combine to draw the viewer into a situation that has a very concrete atmosphere. Often, it seems as if the camera were feeling its way over the scenes like a blind man, holding them in a state of suspense between remembering and experiencing. The result goes beyond meticulous documentation to cast a visual spell which renders snap judgements impossible and encourages us to reflect on the oppressive reality of locations, on sounds, violence, nameless fates and lives snuffed out.

For while this landscape is also beautiful, here too, betrayal lurks. Power and impotence, violence and loss have deformed it. Yet for all their fragility, the resistance of tender recollection and tough and invigorating hope have also taken refuge in its image.

Zarina Bhimji was born in 1963 in Mbarara, Uganda, the daughter of immigrants from India. Following their expulsion by Idi Amin in 1974, she and her family emigrated to the UK. From 1983 to 1986 she studied at Goldsmiths" College in London, and from 1988 to 1989 at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work comprises films, photographs, collages and installations. In her films, she has developed her own unmistakeable visual language: an aesthetic that, in the true meaning of the words, combines and condenses perception and beauty; that makes painful and powerless experiences of violence, banishment and exile, routine exclusion and denied respect not only discernible to the eye and mind but also tangible, as physical and emotional experiences.

"My work is not about the actual facts but about the echo they create, the marks, the gestures and the sound. That's what appeals to me", as Zarina Bhimji has herself said.

Time, that "double headed monster of damnation and salvation", as Samuel Beckett called it, never appears in abstract form in Bhimji's films. Natural time, marked by the course of the sun, and the artificial time of history are interwoven, intertwined, interlocked, intermeshed.

"Blind Spot" is the title of her most recent film from 2023. A blind spot is an area you can"t see, a zone of invisibility, a weak point.

The brick façade of a house seen from below, treetops and, in between, a patch of sky. A house like a wound, imprisoned helplessly between demolition and reconstruction. The fireplace has collapsed, the fire has long since gone out. Plans are drawn on bare walls. An elegiac-sounding male voice off-camera speaks about a girl - Amina - whose fate is being decided on. The voice blends with sounds and noises. Every image, every word, every sound, every tone is part of a dense woven fabric. Light and shade dance on the wall and floor. On one occasion we hear the lapping of waves, as if the sea were breaking from afar against the house's shores. The pliable branches of the trees sway in the wind. Only the green canopy of leaves seems to offer any protection. The green appears ever more clearly in front of dwellings rigidified in stone in which no one lives, while the melodic sing-song of a woman's voice can be heard.

Allison K. Young has said that light and the beauty it reveals are the most important protagonists in Bhimji's work. And indeed, perhaps it is the natural light, the lumen naturale emitted by our central solar body, bringing life to all earthly things, that ultimately outshines and extinguishes all of history's horrors. Could enlightenment in that sense be a natural process of clarification, a sunny illumination and rhythmical clearing of nature, where human beings have failed in the struggle between master and servant? "Our art is one of being blinded by truth; the light cast on the distorted face as it shrinks away is true, nothing else", noted Franz Kafka.

The images that Zarina Bhimji creates breathe. They breathe freedom. A freedom that life and politics - and so, in the end, all of us - have been denying to others and ourselves for far too long. It is customarily referred to as history. It is a melancholy freedom that hurts because it is only accessible through memory. Or in art.

Time, power, shadow, light: through Zarina Bhimji's ability to incarnate a story full of violence in images, metaphors and symbols imbued with hints and echoes of far more than the horror and pain of what has been endured, they work doggedly to undermine power. Gently and yet with determination. It is as if a quiet echo of freedom had replaced the merciless command; as if recollection could ultimately triumph over the brutality of the factual.

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels" Orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I"d be consumed in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains to destroy us." Thus begins Rainer Maria Rilke's first Duino Elegy.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure..." - for Zarina Bhimji, it doesn"t stop there. She, too, believes that without beauty, terror would be impossible to endure. But also, as Heiner Müller responded to Rilke in a short text entitled "Images", written in 1955: "For the beautiful means a possible end of terror."

Zarina Bhimji's works are much more than political statements on expulsion, colonialism and racism - though they surely are that too. With uncompromising thoroughness, political alertness and great empathy and community spirit, they oppose a pseudo-authentic 'sealing" of history. They are replete with echoes: personal, historical, political, but above all physical and natural. Woven into an intricate palimpsest of locations, spaces, walls, colours, voices, tones, sounds, neighbourships, dreams and nightmares, they create an embodied history. That richly aesthetic superabundance of images alone liberates it and shows the way out of its political exile.

Today, Zarina Bhimji's work seems more relevant than ever. The fact that the artist lives in London ironically closes the fatal circle of colonial expansion that has extinguished and damaged so many lives and destroyed so many cultures which had grown up over centuries. From British colonial India, an awareness of Africa rendered more acute by postcolonial perspectives returns to the centre of an empire on which the sun has set. The peacefully flowing imagery of Zarina Bhimji's films lays bare the poison that lurks within both romanticized landscapes and national history books.

Thank you for listening. Congratulations, Zarina Bhimji, on receiving the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2024.