Zarina Bhimji2018Tate Britain10

Ann Gallagher State University of New York-OswegoM. M. Neelika Jayawardane

– M. Neelika Jayawardane

– Ann Gallagher

Lead White is the culmination of a ten-year-long investigation by renowned British artist Zarina Bhimji, conducted over multiple continents, delving into national archives to source objects and ephemera that together document and interrogate the legacies of the powerful and the monumental.

Carefully researched, photographed and curated, and combining digital technology with traditional craft, Lead White explores the idea of the archive how photographs and maps, official stamps and white cotton ribbons, lists and handwritten letters in coloured ink create narratives and enforce institutional ideologies. Bhimji draws parallels between Lead White and a musical score, its repetition of words and textures creating a cacophony of sound and motion, through which she draws attention to language, gestures, light and shadows to comment on the culture of power.

Accompanied by a series of evocative texts by the artist herself, and essays by curator Ann Gallagher and Professor M. Neelika Jayawardane, giving invaluable insights into Bhimji’s project and working methods, Lead White is a profound and poetic meditation on legality, power and beauty.

As with her previous films, the images in this installation form a conceptual inquiry that remarks on the fluidity of memory and the seeming permanence of objects
M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE

Bhimjis work achieves its resonance through its intense focus on landscapes and architectural spaces, and on the abstract or poetic qualities of details.
ANN GALLAGHER