Zarina Bhimji

Interview by Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Volume 12, Number 1, 1992

Transcript

Zarina Bhimji came to Britain with her family when they were forced to leave Uganda in the early seventies. In her work, which uses powerful autobiographical elements, she explores the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory nature of identity through reference to belief, displacement, culture, ritual and memory.

Interviewer: Your recent exhibition at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham consisted of a long shelf ranged around the gallery with a number of boxes made of glass, with different things in them. What’s in the boxes and why?

Zarina Bhimji: Some of the objects in the glass shoe boxes were balloons; broken glass; utensils; burnt shirts; roses; hair; a wig; a dopatha, which is a head covering, wrapped in tulips which dried up whilst the installation was on; carrots I’d collected over two years; a ceremonial Sikh sword; a Sikh knife. The shoe boxes were a metaphor for classifying a kind of history, almost like a museum, but also they are a metaphor for childhood, you know, like a child burying dead birds in it, so it was the idea of death as well.

I: Unlike a lot of your work, it’s not a photographic installation, but would you say that there is some kind of carry-though from photography in the idea of using a receptacle that light can pass through?

ZB: I suppose some of the work is about being able to reveal or hide. I felt frustrated for the last year and a half making photographs. I didn’t feel that I could actually say what I wanted, and the photographic image seemed dead. It was a gradual process of moving away. I started photographing pubic hair and things like that, which didn’t work as well as when they were in the glass shoe boxes. I was comparing pubic hair with saffron, in terms of meanings, and I didn’t want to kind of specify; in photographic form you control it in a different way to when you have them as real objects.

I: So this idea of fragility that one gets from these materials – tissue paper, cotton, muslin and so on, that idea of vulnerability relates to the idea of childhood, but also of purity.

ZB: What I’m interested in is the idea of contradiction. I have been reading TS Eliot’s poetry, where he says we had the experience but miss the meaning. And in a way that’s what I’m concerned about. You do things in childhood that don’t make sense in adult life. Or it has a different meaning. And that is part of what this installation was trying to look at. But also it was looking at death and decay; the carrots were meant to signify penises – shrivelled penises – but they changed over six weeks because they decayed. And that, in a way, was quite frightening.

I: Are you trying to find a way to avoid that process of decay or do you embrace it as inevitable?

ZB: I suppose I went through a period where I didn’t actually want people to enjoy art, or, I was questioning the idea that art is supposed to be beautiful. Two years ago I intentionally made my images beautiful, and this time I wanted to go to the other extreme. I’ve become closer to what I want to talk about as well, but I didn’t want it to be literal to the audience. I wanted them to feel something, but not rationalise it.

I: As a way of working, it’s quite a large shift to a time-based installation where the organic matter actually changes.

ZB: And things like balloons do, too. I blew them up at Christmas time and then the show was in April and it was like skin changing. And during the installation whilst they were in the boxes they changed as well. I think I was a bit shocked by that, because it was almost like real life, you know, when people die. And so elements were put together which didn’t make sense, but then they made sense in a different way.

I: There is a range of connections between materials as metaphors for the body and materials as carriers of a cultural meaning. You’ve mentioned the balloon and its relationship to skin, and the relationship between saffron and pubic hair. What kinds of things are going on in those relationships?

ZB: Saffron is used in celebrations on wedding nights. But then it’s very similar, if you melt it, to blood. It’s like menstruation. I know what I want to say. The glass shoe boxes were about sexuality, sexual abuse, coffins, things like that. I was trying to understand religion, sexuality and loss... things like that. I’m trying to understand the idea of being honest when making the work. I like the idea of people crying when they see the work, because I do want to touch on something that they feel is important and feel moved by.

I: Your work always puts one in a very vulnerable position. It’s not only the materials you use that suggest that, but also the way in which you deal with the question of identity. Coming into Britain, being allowed to stay here, obviously had very personal relevance to you coming here from Uganda when you were a young girl. But that seems not only to be a very personal thing but to extend to all of us. This idea of our own identity being constantly constructed, something we always have to shore up.

ZB: Salman Rushdie said that he was envious of people who said they knew who they were, and there is an element where I feel I wish I could be black and white about whether to have babies, or whether to get a job. I mean, it’s never a clear line.

I: Could you tell me something about this other part of the installation, which is a series of cotton shirts suspended from the ceiling with burn marks in them?

ZB: There are about 70 shirts. They are children’s kurtas, and the lighting was arranged to suggest evening. They were suspended from the ceiling and people had to either look at them from one corner or walk into the space and experience these burnt shirts very differently. This work’s taken me a long time to make. What I wanted to do was talk about brown skin, but at the same time I had problems because I went through a phase of being anti Indian objects and trying not to bring them into my work. I suppose I want to make work that doesn’t show that I could be an Indian woman. At the same time, I know that when I switch on the television there are no Indian people on it, so there is a need to be around brown skins and feel the kind of warmth of that. So, I suppose it’s inevitable that I return to these kurtas. I wanted to talk about where feelings are contained in the body.

I: You mentioned the idea of abuse. Does that come into this process of burning?

ZB: I’m not quite sure whether this work is dealing with abuse or whether it’s dealing with anger. The actual process of burning is quite an angry thing to do. In another sense it’s dealing with ideas about a school playground, where the colour of the skin becomes quite vulnerable. But then the way they were hung, they were kind of floating in the air almost like ghosts. And I suppose I have been thinking a lot about the idea of leaving your body and being in a different state. And I suppose that is dealing with issues around abuse, where you don’t want to be in your own body in order to cope with it.

I: You came to Britain from Uganda and you didn’t actually go to India until much later on, and yet obviously it’s extremely important culturally for you.

ZB: I suppose it’s important on one level that I was brought up with the language, so I speak it fluently. Our experiences are confirmed not just by what we see but what we hear, and smells and textures and things like that. As a child I enjoyed that side of life. The idea of performance comes out of being a child, enjoying going to the mosque and being melodramatic and praying to God. But I know that the first time I went to India I was shocked. So many brown-skinned people there.

I: Was there any sense that you actually recognised it when you got there for the first time?

ZB: I suppose I was surprised by how much I had absorbed stereotypes of Indian people from Western situations, so at one point I was really scared of being on my own. But after a while I felt a lot safer, and I like the idea of taking your shoes off when you enter places; and the way I experience my own body in India is very different to experiencing it here. I think in Indian culture people are more aware of their own bodies without even knowing that they are.