Page 2 - Yellow Patch News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

In 1972 Idi Amin expelled eighty thousand South Asians from Uganda; among those who would eventually become refugees was eleven-year-old Zarina Bhimji. In her exhibition “Black Pocket,” that history unravels like the notes of an aromatic fougère, with sweetness morphing into damp mossy decay, faintly musty with spice. The survey spans thirty years and is a study in restraint: three films, three installations, three stand-alone photographs, and Untitled (A sketch), 1999, featuring three dresses, girlishly short, with Peter Pan collars, sewn out of maps of the subcontinent, East Africa, a...

The word that stayed with me the longest after seeing Zarina Bhimji’s exhibition Black Pocket was the one that I couldn’t read. It hovered in the middle of a handwritten letter—an excerpt of which had been photographed, blown up, and hung high above our heads at her recent solo show at the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. The phrase “the Abolition of Negro … in his Domain” and the dates “1857, 58 & …” were clear, but in between them, the meaning of a word that resembled “Risirial,” or perhaps “Virinial,” remained just out of reach. It is often the unkno...