“I was truly delighted with this wonderful news. Christoph Gruneberg, Director of Tate Liverpool and Chairman of the 2007 Turner Prize Jury, informed me that my name has been short-listed for this year’s award,” she said.
She has been short-listed for her recent solo exhibitions at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London and Zurich.
Though a large body of her work focuses on Uganda, “this work is not all about her memories of the African nation.” “It’s about the universal feelings of love, grief, spirituality, beauty and extermination,” she says.
Bhimji, 44, migrated to Leicester with her family in 1974 after Ugandan Asians were ordered to leave the country by dictator Idi Amin.
Although her journey of life has little to do with India, the country attracts her a lot. “I keep visiting the country regularly. I like the works of M F Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil a lot. However, I don’t see myself just as an Indian or an African or an English. I am an artist,” she says.
While leaving Uganda, Bhimji was old enough to absorb the trauma of forced migration and young enough not to be scarred forever. “That erasure, elimination and extermination might have dotted my work. I am not a documentary photographer. I am an artist,” says Bhimji.
Her exhibition comprised photographs that she had taken for her documentary film Out of Blue, commissioned for Documenta 11, held in Cologne, Germany, in 2002.
Coming from Mbarara, Uganda, Bhimji feels it was another life left behind — cold, claustrophobic and alien in respect of language and food. Her inability to speak English further intensified her isolation that reflected in her early work.
As a young girl, she showed her interest in arts. It might have been as unusual vocation in those days, but young Bhimji luckily found her mentor in her family members. “I just told them this is what I wanted to do and they said they are fine with it. And that’s how I went on to do what I wanted to do.”
Bhimji went to Goldsmiths in 1983 and then in 1988 she joined the prestigious Slade School of Fine arts. Following her post-graduate work she became an Artist in Residence at Darwin College in Cambridge.