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’.

This major publication spans Bhimji’s career from She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (1987), a photo-text installation that explores politics, voice, beauty and love as forms of resistance to her most recent work, a new film, Blind Spot (2023). Also lavishly illustrated 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. With an essay by Allison K Young looking at he decades-wide arc of Bhimji’s practice which also saw monumental shifts in the art world that received it. It also includes a conversation between Zarina Bhimji and novelist Kamila Shamsie which moves from childhood recollections to the poetry, music and cultural influences on Bhimjis work and the research behind it.

Zarina Bhimji, 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 Documenta 11, 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. She has had solo institutional exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery (2012), Tate Britain (2018) and Sharjah Art Foundation (2020). Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels including Burnt Shadows (2009), A God in Every Stone (2014) , Home Fire (2017) which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction) and Best of Friends (2022), and is also a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature Allison K. Young is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, and an affiliate faculty member in African and African American Studies (AAAS) at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her scholarship, curatorial practice, and arts criticism focus on postcolonial and contemporary artists and art histories of the global South.

112pp Hardback

280 x 210mm landscape

65 colour illustrations

ISBN 978-1-908612-70-0