“Categories Always Leak: Zarina Bhimji’s Institutional Critique,” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 47, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2026)
In the mid-1990s, Zarina Bhimji produced several bodies of work that explored the intersecting histories of science, biopolitics, and photography. Her engagement with these themes was, in part, enabled by a series of residences that granted her access to some of England’s premier academic and medical institutionas, among them the Victoria and Albert Museum, Darwin College at the University of Cambridge, and Charing Cross Hospital. In series such as I will Always Be Here (1992), 1822-Now (1993), and Listen to the Room (1995), Bhimji utilizes visual framing devices such as vitrines, metal shelving, and compositional geometries in ways that mirror an Enlightenment visuality, while exposing the modes of social control that are linked to such classificatory strategies. At the same time, they are among the least overtly biographical of the artist’s early works, a fact attributable to her stated fatigue, at the time, with the tokenization of Black artists’ works within the British art establishment, a phenomenon that is itself not unconnected to techniques of taxonomy and surveillance that emerged amidst colonialist and racial capitalism. This article advance the scholarship on this understudied phase of Bhimji’s practice, while also expanding the art historical context for such series. It places Bhimji’s work in dialogue with that of contemporaries, such as Susan Hiller, Christian Boltanski, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Helen Chadwick, to explore how British-based artists deployed a wide range of stylistic modes in refusing or exposing the violences of classification.
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