Zarina Bhimji, Whitechapel Gallery - review

Her family settled in Leicester, and this, her first UK retrospective, reflects on her complex history and the connected themes of colonialism and displacement, through photographs, installations and two remarkable films.

Bhimji's landscapes and interiors are deserted but for the occasional stray dog or weaving spider.

Her photographic series Love (1998-2007), shot when she revisited Uganda, features interiors once bustling with human life but now empty. Elegiac in mood and very beautiful, the photographs are immaculately composed, with an acute sensitivity to the play of light across rooms and surfaces.

This painterly quality gains its fullest expression in her films. Alongside brooding landscapes, Out of Blue (2002) focuses on those same bleak Ugandan interiors, which gain menace on film. Towards the end a scene features African children playing in a village, just before shots of an airport runway and finally a deep blue sky - a moving conclusion evoking Bhimji's childhood joy before Amin.

Yellow Patch (2011) loosely illustrates the experience of Asians who left for East Africa in the 19th century. From the remnants of British colonial administration in a Mumbai port building to decaying interiors in once splendid Gujarati buildings, all cracked walls and skeletal settees, it moves on to a desert landscape and a port on the Indian Ocean. Every shot is to be savoured for its colour and composition, yet colonialism and its legacies and effects loom large, not least in the slow journey up a stone statue of Queen Victoria, ending with her literally defaced head.

Bhimji tells rich stories not through actors or living people but through the ghosts that we imagine inhabiting her desolate scenes. It makes for a stirring show.

Until March 9 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)

Zarina Bhimji
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
E1 7QX