Zarina Bhimji Awarded the 2024 Roswitha Haftmann Prize

Ugandan Indian photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist Zarina Bhimji, known for her poetic films investigating notions of place through architecture and landscape, has won theRoswitha Haftmann Prize. Established in 2001, the honor, which is accompanied by a no-strings-attached cash purse of 150,000 Swiss francs ($177,000), is named for late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann and is administered by Kunsthaus Zürich. It is Europe’s largest arts prize and is typically given in recognition of an artist’s body of work over a lifetime. The award will be presented to Bhimji in a ceremony set to take place November 29 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

The London-based Bhimji—who was born in Mbarara, Uganda, in 1963 and as a child fled the country with her family after General Idi Amin forcibly expelled 80,000 Asians—travels frequently, setting up temporary open-air studios in locations such as East Africa and India. She uses these as loci from which to conduct research before returning home to assemble a given work. “Bhimji’s mostly unpeopled films have a burnished quality that transcends the timescale of flesh,” wrote Rahel Aima in a 2021 issue ofArtforum. “They tap into something deeper: architectural or geologic memories of long-gone populations whose bodies are absent but whose stories seem to have seeped into buildings and the natural environment like contaminated groundwater.”

“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,” said Thomas Wagner, a member of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation’s board, in a statement. “[Her] work, which is more topical than ever today, is an unmistakable 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.”