 Good evening, everyone. My name is Pierre Sauris and I'm a lecturer on the MA in contemporary art at the Sotheby's Institute of Art. This even is part of the artist talk series that are organized by SOAS and Sotheby's Institute. The idea is to invite artists at different stages of their careers, artists from different parts of the world, to talk about their work. So that can be artists who want to talk about their practice in general. We also had in the past artists who focused on a particular period of their art and we even had talks about one single work. Over the past years, we had the pleasure to have artists such as Lidia Uraman from Algeria, Aiguille Young from South Korea, William Kentridge also came here from South Africa, and recently, just last month, Hassan Musa from Sudan came and talked to us. Tonight, we are absolutely delighted to welcome Zarina Bimji here, who is here with us, and I will ask Shane McCoslon, who is Percival David Professor of the History of Art, to introduce Zarina. Thank you very much, Pierre, and good evening. From me, Shane, in my role as the Head of School of Arts at SOAS. So tonight's talk by Zarina Bimji is going to be my pleasure to be the moderator for tonight's proceedings and to introduce Zarina in a moment. So the format of the evening is essentially that Zarina will give a talk to some slides talking about what we'll see in a moment. Then there will be a period where she and I will be in conversation on the stage and then there will be opportunities to open it up and field questions from the audience. Let me just say that if you don't feel comfortable piping up and asking a question in the audience, feel free to jot it on a piece of paper and just hand it to me on the stage and I will happily open up those questions as well. So after the session here, there will be a reception outside as well where there'll be if you'll be thirsty by then, I'm sure, and there'll be some wine and things and a chance to mingle and to meet the speaker. So as I'm sure we all are, I'm absolutely thrilled to have Zarina Bimji speaking here tonight about her current, well primarily we think, about her current show at Tate Britain, Lead White, a wonderful show that I recommend you will see if you haven't already, which consists of some very, very large, very high quality digital photography mainly taken in colonial archives around the world, but also of needlework pieces, a map and a page from archives. The show runs until June and I'm absolutely thrilled actually that Zarina's first artist talk on the exhibition is here at SOAS, we got in there before Tate, isn't that wonderful? She knows Bloomsbury, she knows SOAS very well, in fact she even recorded mosquitoes next door at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for her film Out of Blue in 22, so she's I think familiar with the world around here. Lead White, so the name comes from an old colour which implies beauty but also toxicity to me and I found it very interesting, it also speaks to the manner in which she takes seemingly very ordinary things, everyday things and allows them to become ideas and feelings and to have some kind of psychological effect or sentiment or values and the show explores, as I think she will explain in a minute, but at least for me, if you fall for the idea that photography is transparent then you're taken straight away into the pages of archives. It really kind of makes sense that this topic is going to be explored here at SOAS because something underlying Zarina's work is this colonial network or even a post-colonial network, you could say, linking the United Kingdom with South Asia because of her where she has family heritage in Gujarat with East Africa because she was born in Mbarara in Uganda in the 1960s. She actually fled to the UK with her family in 1974 but didn't actually return to Uganda until 1998 by which time she had in fact trained as an artist, first at Leicester Polytechnic then at Goldsmiths in the early 1980s and finally at the Slade in the late 1980s but she returned to Uganda and East Africa and she subsequently worked there and conducted detective work as she's called it in archives in London and Edinburgh and Zanzibar and elsewhere exploring the creation and the polity of the land of her birth in films like Out of Blue from 2002 which I just mentioned which was partly inspired by Arabic Ghazals and Urdu lyrics of the Sufi singer Abidah Parveen, films like Waiting from 2009, films like Jangbar from 2015, Jangbar being the Gujarati name for Zanzibar meaning the coast of the blacks to which she'll speak shortly. So she might not really like my introducing her this way through a post-colonial context because she's actually been exhibited and collected all over the world and critically celebrated not least being nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007 so I think rightly she sees herself not as an Indian artist or an African artist but as an artist and as an artist she is a filmmaker, firstly a photographer then I think a filmmaker, installation artist, writer, poet and most recently an embroiderer or tapestry maker. Anyway I'm absolutely thrilled that she's come to speak to her to speak to us about her work and practice things she has called the implied sound or strange links between history memory and fantasy so please join me in giving a warm welcome to Serena Bhimji. Hi good evening, thank you for coming and thank you Shane, it's a real pleasure to be here. I'm going to talk about five works but I'll start with the current piece that's being shown at the Tate and please excuse me whilst I try to work, oh yes great I hope you can see the images, could we have a bit darker please? Thank you so this is the installation, a little bit of light here, it's actually okay for the screen but just maybe light here, it's better if it's darker but little light for me, okay so this is led white so there's three pieces being shown at the Tate, it's part of the spotlight series, it's on at Tate Britain and there is two textile pieces, the title for that is Black, sorry I can't really, I have to put my glasses on, I have forgotten the title here and I think I've written it wrong, it's something black and then half white, those are the two textile pieces so I wanted to remember this moment, this moment of the documents, it is important that this work is sensory experience, a justification might be offered about the work, it's not useful, I have been thinking about this work for a while, on holiday I read Beyond a Boundary by CLR James and that book was in a way really important in kind of getting the feeling for the work so basically I was really drawn to his in the book, his passion for literature so how do I start this work, the idea of touch, physical act of mark making with the camera at the start it was important to make this language, I spent ages looking in the camera to make sense, what was it, why this, I worked very slowly, it took me ages to make this work, gradually it developed, colour is really important in my work, it's the first time I've worked digitally and also the fact that it was in the archive I had to make this work publicly, the light has always been important in my work, this work has to be physical, even the editing was decided by mood and feeling, I selected photographs slowly, it was the first time I worked with the printer as well because the printer relationship is really important in the way that they can translate the work in the way that you want it, I didn't want to focus on a particular agenda but look at the photographs, it was really important the surface of photographs, scale, tone, how deep the marks were into the paper, so I just, and while I was selecting these images I kept thinking about sound, I have always been interested in sound score so I could hear in the images sound, the type of text spatially and how big to print, all this was, allows me to focus on photography, I assume I know about race or colonialism but what I find difficult is about this, is the way it's talked about, same language, same sort of associations are used but what about another private understanding of this work as well, the titles are important, they make additional marks, it's not about the explanation but part of the gestures, the whole work and I'm an artist, I use the visual medium, if I could write about it or talk about it that's what I would do but actually the work physically happens and it's that intensity of from the beginning till the end is really important, like in this image the way it was photographed, the gestures, the composition, all that become, they somehow, you look at it and you know that the image is working, in terms of themes, in I was interested in power, vulnerability, erasure, I work with light which I hope expresses this mood and feeling, the composition also helps this too, I'm interested in the weight of the image, how are the gesture and space communicated, the tone, the light, composition, even the choice of film, choice of paper, all those things, those decisions help this work to give a kind of delicateness that I wanted, that's why I chose not to frame this work, the way the light falls on colour is endless and I try to get to this, mark making is a thinking and a practice in one, it's hard to put it in words, thinking through my eyes and body and again referring to the themes that were in this work were self-hate, not myself hate but actually in the words, segregation, menace, fast, slow, text, size, tone, colour, gentle, I approach this intuitively, thinking it, my way of seeing and thinking it is different, yeah and then again what I wanted to do was talk about installation, how I put it together which was quite a challenge because I'd taken the photographs and when I made this work I'd actually worked in film before and working as a film installation artist is very different so I approached and I hadn't made photographs for about 10, 12 years so I'd forgotten how to make photographs and so I took the photographs then I worked out the sizes for this work and then to hang it I hadn't known till the very end, I wanted a narrative that was not linear, wanted to hang it in groups, it has to work across and some images were an anchor and scale and there is also a red that runs through throughout the images so I'll just go through these slides, the kind of the textual quality you can see and also I hope you can can you hear me, the way I also manipulated digitally took out words, we changed colours added like at the bottom you can't see but the kind of edging so these are detailed shots, some of you who have not seen the installation so the stamps were on one side and then text was on the other side of the wall, I find this one really funny because you can you know Queen's Court, Victoria Road, how in many ways light and subtle these, I found this really amusing, I could have gone more this way with the work and the one before to kind of keep it more visual but I actually chose to give it some kind of context and some words in here I'd taken out so that the puncturing came through more abruptly with the words to get to close, to get to the bone of it so after I made the work I was going to put these images because I wanted a different kind of full stop and in the end it got changed and I put some embroidery in it, these are cars that were photographed in Zanzibar and for me they were, I shot these on film and they were, for me they represent Zanzibar Revolution or some kind of revolution and we worked on this image a lot and I wanted it to look like a fashion shot and I wanted everyday objects to express vulnerability against those texts, the feeling of everyday life and I wanted to put the C image which I've shot this image about 15 years ago and I haven't known how to have it in the piece but I realized that by different way of printing it and making it gloomy like this it would work better so in the end decided to put a map of Africa, I was in the archives and I actually burst into tears reading these books where how Africa was carved up in Europe and so it took me a while to find the right map because I wanted it to be beautiful as well, I wanted also that I wanted it to feel like linen fabric that you would have in bed that you would be lying so that was the kind of relationship I think I was trying to create was something that you were in bed, wonderful but harsh words coming through so when you look at the detail it's hand embroidered really beautiful so this this I wanted to show this of three dresses I made before I made a set of photographs in Uganda in 1998 I'd given up all my teaching and I'd been given a Paul Hamlin Award these are sketches of three maps made of of India Africa and Britain so I have a long interest in maps but I've never found a way of making sense of it and then in my first trip to Uganda I made three photographs this one is called grenade and the size is 127 times 160 centimeters it's in the form of light box and this one is memories were trapped inside the asphalt when I took this image I realized that certain things couldn't be made as a photograph and that I had to actually make a film and this this work taught me a lot about filmmaking because I was thinking about the shoes and evidence and what type of evidence do we do we find if we put the shoes under the magnifying glass this one is howling like dogs I swallowed solid air and it's in the collection of the government art collection these are light box early works were light boxes this is illegal sleep so when I went to Uganda I was exploring this is when I make films I always make large format photographs so in a way in the beginning they're like sketches a way of making sense what film might be but then later they become photographs so this one is called illegal sleep and one of the things that I was exploring was this idea of large-scale betrayal a human activity that is interrupted atmosphere of subdued sadness and tenderness this one is called Bappa closed his heart it was over it's actually at the intubate the old intubate airport in Kampala and the way the photographs are presented is really important to me when I mean not as much now but when I was making this work you saw starving images of African people and they were really frightening images to look at but my feeling about Africa was not like that and so I wanted these images to be really beautiful and composed and almost painterly so these are in various museums that this was in I forget the museum sorry but there in various museums shown so they have a lot of silence and quietness and space around it and when when I what I call I do wreckies before I make my films so like I made 40 works and I visited prisons housing in fact the housing was inspired by when I was researching for this film at the SOAS library which I will explain in a minute I'm just going to show a clip of my first film that I made which is called Out of Blue it's a single screen installation 26 minutes long I'm not going to show you 26 minutes tonight one minute clip and it's in the collection of Tate Wordsworth at the M in USA Modern Museum Stockholm Artist Institute of Chicago um it was really important to me that these works went into museum collection because of the history of uh Idi Amin various things like that I when I was doing research I realized that there wasn't much creative work at the time done apart from Mahmood Mamdani writing poetry which is here at the SOAS library his early remembrance of coming and living in camps and there's also another book that was really inspirational I looked at newspaper cuttings from 1972 to 74 and that's how I plotted the film but one thing that I found here in SOAS library was a PhD student who had written about ginger and how the city was planned and it was looking at classes of homes by former European homes high-class residential zones and he describes Indian homes which have mixture of commercial and residential and how they carry uh Indian accent on it and it's really true like when I went to ginger I noticed very typical Gujarati things and that inspired me to the tone of the film and the pace of the film so I'm just going to hopefully put this clip on I don't know how do I oh yes I think it's I think I need help with this how to put it on the film oh yeah here it is I found it thank you there was no script the sound is equal to the image and I wanted like you know when hear a radio it's you feel part of that world and I wanted the sound to feel like that so you have to imagine what the dust feels like the texture and the physicality so the way the work is installed you physically have to inhabit the space I really like film material you can translate it the way you want it and you can take you know like I wanted to look at historical events but I wanted to approach it metaphorically rather than factually but the way I did it was by focusing the detail the smell the touch understanding this inform me how to shoot the image and layer the sound I also did research in British Library here at SOAS where I looked at um illiteracy the the yearning for filmmaking came when I was watching loads of Iranian cinema and one particular film where this gentleman in the middle of nowhere in big mountains walks with blackboards and is teaching people to read and I found that really touching um and also the other thing I did was read like this woman had come from Uganda and she was married but she didn't have any documents so she couldn't claim for benefits she didn't have a marriage certificate so she couldn't prove that she was married she was illiterate so I got interested in this idea of power of documents um you know in a way the earlier work that I showed you the current work that's being shown at the Tate again that is to do with power of documents I also looked at as I said earlier uh international press at how the Ugandan um Idi Amin asking the Indians to leave how it was written about um from the observer to uh LA Times so I looked at all the newspapers because I really I get a bit obsessed about these things because I wanted to make sense of uh I even went to um uh I forget now this way they tell you about torture and human rights organization I forget the name of it and what I was interested in was details of light and texture but underneath that I wanted to embed erasure extermination and elimination how this is done in history um how time gets forgotten um do I have time to show one more or have I gone over this is how the installation is uh I've got some installation shots and close up of some of the images some of the in outer blue some of the images um when I was talking about the phd uh uh the housing phd uh student thesis that I read um it go down a bit yeah thank you because the people can't see the images yeah thank you thank you you can close it I think I might be able to you can switch it off completely be fine yeah sorry I want you to see the images when I was talking about the phd student that I'd read the housing dissertation what I found I was interested in was a house being like skin and a place for the walls being um like skin and a protection layer for intimacy that's what I was trying to partly express as well so the angles we used and the way the lenses we used uh I asked the cameraman to film it in this way in this little bit of light um giving a feeling am I going backwards I'm sorry sorry my memory is bad these were the cells so I'm just quickly going to show you just images of my next film that I made for uh it was in a size or factory uh when I was nominated for a turner price that was about eight this is it was called waiting and this was uh a film that was shot in Kenya uh called Jangba it was commissioned by Nottingham art exchange um these are just quick images uh I shot in India when I was making yellow patch these are like background research I've not this one I have never printed it so I'm going to show last piece of work which is uh called she'd love to breathe pure silence it is my early work that I did in 1986 and one of the things that I've discovered is um I have a real difficulty with photography and having it framed on the wall um and when I was making this work that's when it came up um this just to give you a bit of background to this work was um when Indian women were arriving at Heathrow airport in the 70s they were forced to undergo virginity test at the request of home office officials in order to determine if there were virgins one woman challenged and then these tests were found to be illegal so this was this is how I was I was inspired by this and going to Heathrow airport but also the way the text is written I'm really interested in the size of the font the typeface it's treated equally like the way I feel about sound or um it's a part of visual form for me um and so here I can everybody read this do I need to read it would anybody hands up if you want me to read it oh okay great um slowly she raised her arm thin dark brown in sun haze circled by two heavy gold bangles this had come from home every smiley girl wore from birth and I'm sure some of you will recognize these uh anklets uh and this this work is in the collection of victor and albert museum and um this bird was found in our garden so I quickly took a picture of it and its hand tinted um uh black and white photograph by hand tinted the anger turned inward where could I go except to make pain it flowed into me with her milk it was mothers and others as they were alike those watchful wrathful women whose eyes seared laid bare those tongues that lash the world in unremitting distrust and then you see the passport stamp and behind it uh so basically suspended from the ceiling this work and underneath is turmeric and chili powder uh and where you saw the passport sign is the uh gloves surgical gloves that took that during the examination metaphorically so I I like this work because it's um about performance the work becomes alive when you put turmeric and chili powder but also in weddings a woman Indian woman I was going to say woman and assume a woman's because uh yeah when you get married turmeric is put on your body and also I like the chili in the 70s when there was a lot of packy bashing going on uh in Leicester some of us thought that using chili powder was a form of defense like during Navratri National Front would break in to a hall and so as we grew older compared to our parents we decided to take the law into our own hands and protect ourselves so chili was something for me uh as a metaphor but also I like the fact that it's domestic object that becomes public um I will end with one more note um to say that I photograph things that I can't film and I film things that I can't photograph and I think that's it I'm going to stop I think there's uh maybe yeah just that's it thank you