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Archive Aesthetics: Zarina Bhimji’s Poetics of Print, Sound, and Vision

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Neelam Srivastava

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Abstract

Print culture presupposes the act of reading as necessary to its instantiation. What happens when the artist, instead of making reading the primary purpose of the journey into the archives, turns print forms into an object for view? This essay focuses on the work of Zarina Bhimji, whose videos and gallery installations seek to revisit the moment of the forced expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in 1972 by Idi Amin, while also documenting the broader history of the South Asian diaspora in Africa and Britain. Her work contains an affective reflection and recuperation of the postcolonial past and on her focus on the archive as artistic source and inspiration, emerging across her diverse use of visual and aural mediums. The essay explores how research into colonial and postcolonial print and sound archives is encoded in Bhimji’s art, both as image and as the hidden scaffolding on which its aesthetic effects are built.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Srivastava N

Editor(s): Toral Gajarawala; Neelam Srivastava; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan; Jack Webb

Series Editor(s): Ben Doyle

Publication type: Book Chapter

Publication status: Published

Book Title: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Postcolonial Print Cultures

Year: 2023

Volume: 1

Pages: 283-297

Print publication date: 07/09/2023

Online publication date: 10/08/2023

Acceptance date: 13/09/2021

Series Title: Bloomsbury Handbooks

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Place Published: London

URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-handbook-of-postcolonial-print-cultures-9781350261754/

Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item

ISBN: 9781350261754


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