ZURICH.- The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation announced that the artist Zarina Bhimji, born in Uganda and living in London, is awarded with Europe’s best-endowed art award—the Roswitha Haftmann Prize.
The prize, installed according to the will of the late Swiss gallerist Roswitha Haftmann (1924–1998) honours the lifetime achievements of exceptional artists. Zarina Bhimji is its 22nd recipient. The Prize will be handed over to her during an award ceremony on November 29, 2024 at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Previous winners have included Walter De Maria, Maria Lassnig, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Sigmar Polke, Pierre Huyghe, Trisha Brown, Lawrence Weiner, Gülsün Karamustafa, VALIE EXPORT and Cildo Meireles. The Prize is unique in that it imposes no additional conditions and allows its recipients to freely use the generous prize money (CHF 150,000) as they see fit, for example to fund new artistic activities or document and preserve their inventory or workshop.
The winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize is chosen by the Foundation Board, whose members include, according to statutes, the directors of Kunstmuseum Basel (Elena Filipovic/Dr. Josef Helfenstein), the Kunstmuseum Bern (Dr. Nina Zimmer) and Museum Ludwig (Dr. Yilmaz Dziewior) in Cologne, with the Director of the Kunsthaus Zürich (Ann Demeester) acting as chair, along with members co-opted by the board, such as the journalist and art critic Prof. Thomas Wagner, who will deliver the laudation for this year’s award recipient, Karola Kraus (Director Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and Prof. Dr. Bernhart Schwenk (Curator for Contemporary Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich).
It is the exceptional but subdued force of Zarina Bhimji’s work 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.”
To open Bhimji’s work up to a wide audience, her films Yellow Patch (2011) and Blind Spot (2023) will be shown in a two phased screening between November 29, 2024 and April 6, 2025 at the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Zarina Bhimji (1963) was born in Uganda 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.
