2003 Infinity Award: Art

Born in 1963 in Mbarara, Uganda, Zarina Bhimji now lives and works in London and Berlin. She emigrated at the age of 12 when her family was exiled by President Idi Amin's expulsion of Ugandan Asians from the country.

Bhimji began exhibiting her work in group exhibitions as early as 1987, immediately after receiving a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the University of London. Following post-graduate work she became an Artist in Residence at Darwin College in Cambridge. There she staged installations and photographic exhibitions related to her ongoing artistic exploration of her own physical body and the procedures associated partnered with death and the dead. In 1996, her work was part of the In/Sight exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. One of her latest works, "Out of Blue", was commissioned and produced by Documenta 11, held in Cologne, Germany in 2002. For this project, Bhimji returned to Uganda to film the architecture, airports, graveyards as well as the military barracks, police cells, and prisons of Amin's reign of terror. 

Her seductive and disturbing early work focused on loss, pain and the language of pain. In her more recent work, she has used photography as part of a greater artistic endeavour to explore and confront the impossibility of coming to terms with "what has happened."