Zarina Bhimji

Met with Laura, Marion and Valerie to see Zarina Bhimji's exhibition of film and photography at the Whitechapel gallery.
The prints downstairs are large and sumptuous while the light boxes and installations upstairs are both densely elusive and searingly pointed in their meanings. But for me it was the films that drew me in - particularly "Out of Blue" 2002 http://www.zarinabhimji.com/dspseries/12/1FW.htm reminiscent of Tarlovsky in its slow rich uncoverings but mostly the sound, it's describing and drawing us into an immersion in the images.

"I’ve never worked with sound before, I’ve always been interested in writing but somehow with sound you can be more atmospheric. You can in writing but it’s dependent on being able to read the English language whereas I wanted the work to reach people who don’t read and write English. Sound is universal and also quite powerful and atmospheric. Sound is used a lot to heal and move people, it’s multi-layered; it’s not definite. I don’t know why I was interested in bad sounds, crow sounds, gun sounds, but I liked them and I listened to those sounds and looked at the picture, and at some stage they came together. A bit like cooking I suppose, you get different ingredients and put them together. But actually the sound is 90% as far as I am concerned in the film because without sound it doesn’t hold in the same way."


Zarina Bhimji 
from an interview from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 20 Number 4 and 21 Number 1, 2002
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/audioarts/cd4_4_transcript.htm