Zarina Bhimji receives the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2024

The CHF 150,000 Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2024 is being awarded to the artist Zarina Bhimji, who lives in the United Kingdom and was born in Uganda. The Prize was originally the initiative of Roswitha Haftmann (1924–1998), whose Foundation has awarded it since 2001 to a living artist who has created an oeuvre of outstanding quality. Roswitha Haftmann was a gallery owner and language teacher who worked as a model for various US photographic agencies and married the art historian Werner Haftmann. She ran a gallery in Zurich until her death in 1998. Born in St. Gallen, she converted her not inconsiderable wealth into a fund which supports the Roswitha Haftmann Prize.

Bhimji’s multi-layered work stands out both aesthetically and conceptually but also as a sophisticated form of social critique. She is one of those understated artists who compellingly explores the state of our planet without recourse to text or spectacular actions. 

Bhimji frequently travels. She temporarily installs open air studios in East Africa, UK and India for research, before assembling a work in her permanent studio. She opts for nuance and complexity, visual poetry and abstraction and a certain elegiac undertone, employing affect rather than effect. Even when approaching the impact of political disruption, histories of occupation, of invasion and of difference, her works are not to be taken as specific for a certain period of time, site or location. Her approach is about universality. Equality, beauty and love are the essentials she puts forward. Bhimji’s films are driven not by plot developments but by an interlayering of painterly images and sonic compositions that let us read the (deserted) landscapes that often feature prominently as dense tapestries of both collective and individual memory. In her work, beauty merges with politics and poetry and it is characterized by a deliberate use of visual ambiguity. The works reflect spaces, micro details and the light of distant interiors. The location of light is an important and intricate element of Bhimji’s composition. The spaces that take centre stage in her work refer to disconnection, incompleteness and belatedness. Bhimji relinquishes precise information and factual presentation in favour of highlighting the aesthetic qualities and poetic potential of each image. The artist herself has said: ‘My work is not about the actual facts but about the echo they create, the marks, the gestures and the sound.’

It is the exceptional work of this accomplished artist, who until now has flown under the radar of the international art trade, that convinced the jury to single her out for Europe’s best-endowed art award. ‘Zarina Bhimji has the ability, through her implicitly empathetic and aesthetically fascinating photographs and films, to involve an audience emotionally and encourage it to reflect’, says Thomas Wagner, member of the Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, adding ‘Zarina Bhimji’s work, which is more topical than ever today, is an unmistakeable blend of life, art, politics and history in which no element compromises any other. The gently flowing imagery of her films lays bare the poison that lurks within both romanticized landscapes and national history books.’ 

Bhimji was born in Uganda in 1963 of Indian parents, but fled the country to the UK at the age of eleven, when General Idi Amin forcibly expelled 80,000 Asians. There she studied at Leicester Polytechnic, Goldsmiths’ College, where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts, and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College London), graduating with a higher diploma in fine art.
Her first solo exhibition was held in 1989 at the Tom Allen Community Arts Centre London. In 2001, she was invited to New York for a solo show at the Talwar Gallery. Since then, her work has been shown at further locations in Europe and the US and, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates (Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah). In Switzerland, Bhimji’s works were presented for the first time in 2006 by the Haunch of Venison gallery in Zurich, followed in 2012 by the Kunstmuseum Bern. They have also featured in group exhibitions around the globe, in countries including Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, China, Pakistan and Russia, and at renowned art shows such as Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), the Turner Prize (2007) and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. British institutions, such as Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, have been especially quick to include Bhimji’s photographs and films in their collections, as have the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris along with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in the US. Latest major acquisitions were made by the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Until the late 1990s, Zarina Bhimji shared her knowledge as a lecturer on photography at the London College of Printing and as an advisor to various universities, schools, galleries and foundations. She lives and works in London.