Echoing spaces: Zarina Bhimji at the Whitechapel Gallery – in pictures

As a child, Bhimji was among the Asian community forced out of Uganda by Idi Amin. Much of her work explores traces of this story in Uganda's landscape and buildings. Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over (2001-06) vividly evokes this sense of a lost past
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

In 2007, Bhimji made the four-strong shortlist for the Turner prize. Among the works featured in the award exhibition at Tate Liverpool was Breathless Love (2007), in which a Turneresque row of partially-constructed boats is seen on a muddy shoreline Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt (1998-2003) vividly captures echoes of the past in dilapidated scenes of the present. Here, the abandoned shoes and remains of an electrical socket hint at an underlying human narrative
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

In Shadows and Disturbances (2007), a pair of once ornate window shutters are framed by crumbling plasterwork, creating an aura of lost splendour. The photograph featured in Bhimji's 2007 Turner prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Bhimji's new film, Yellow Patch (2011), was shot on location in India. An exploration of the landscapes and interiors of Mumbai, Kutch and Gujarat, it premieres simultaneously at the Whitechapel Gallery and the New Art Gallery in Walsall
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Another scene from Bhimji's latest film installation, Yellow Patch. Walls are a recurring motif in her work, resonating with the history of the people who made, inhabited and finally abandoned them
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

A third image from Yellow Patch brings together a range of Bhimji's trademark qualities: light and shadow, stillness, dilapidated architectural grandeur – and a sense of an elusive human narrative
Photograph: Zarina Bhimji/Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Bhimji has described her art as trying to 'speak the unspeakable that wants to be spoken'. Your Sadness is Drunk (2001-2006) depicts a landscape typically free of people yet pregnant with meaning Photograph: Zarina Bhimji /Courtesy the artist and DACS, London

Untitled (1989). The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition, which embraces a quarter century of Bhimji's work, runs from Thursday 19 January to Friday 9 March Photograph: Courtesy the artist and DACS, London