Untitled

This is one of ten colour Polaroid photographs made by Zarina Bhimji during a two-day residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1989. The image depicts an ornate doorway of the museum, with a plaque above spelling out ‘TRUTH’. The photograph was created using double exposure and so is layered with an image of burnt muslin and pinned paper cutouts of men wearing white khadi cloth. Flames appear to burn in the centre of the doorway, further intensifying the enigmatic nature of the work and its beautified, textural quality. To create the series of photographs, Bhimji used a rare large format 20x24-inch Polaroid camera which the V&A curator of photography at the time, Mark Haworth-Booth, requested be brought to the museum specially. 

During her residency, Bhimji examined objects on display in the Indian Collection, a collection of objects from South Asia which were acquired during the 19th century as a result of British colonial settlement in the subcontinent. Bhimji contends with the V&A as a powerful institution implicated in the plunder of British colonialism in South Asia. In this photograph, Bhimji juxtaposes the grandiose architecture of the museum with burning, handwoven cloth - an essential marker of ‘Indianness’ under the British colonial project - in an attempt to disrupt the systemisation of the museum’s collecting practices and the construction of an essentialist Indian identity. The use of muslin in this photographic work recalls Bhimji’s earlier series, She Loved to Breathe - Pure Silence (1987), which features photographs alongside text which is printed on muslin cloth. The burning cloth in this polaroid also opens the photograph towards readings of loss, grief and displacement, which highlights the means by which the V&A acquired many of the objects in its Indian Collection.