The Skinny Showcase: Omar Zingaro Bhatia

Omar Zingaro Bhatia was awarded The Skinny Award at last year’s RSA New Contemporaries show. We’d first noticed his work at the Dundee degree show in 2009, and were impressed with his Spuriosity Shop when it came to the exhibition on the Mound. His installation of personal detritus draws in the viewer, hinting at multiple stories and histories that are infused with an overarching fascination with identity and self. Recently he’s been exploring the potentials of blogs as artwork, and you can see the results at
www.zingaromar.blogspot.com

 

Fact File

• -Omar's dream as a child, unrealised to this day, was to literally be Macaulay Culkin.

• -When his pet cat Moriarty died, Omar dug him up to make sure that he was indeed dead.

• The strangest place Omar ever slept was a graveyard in Sighisoara, Transylvania.

• Omar once witnessed an extremely rare lunar rainbow on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Arusha National Park.

• As a child and much to his eternal shame, Omar constructed a gecko gallows upon which he hung his reptilian trophies.

• He once hitch-hiked over 1000km through Eastern Europe.

• A young Mr Bhatia once went skinny dipping with his parents in a deserted cove on Vancouver island, an event which disturbs him to this day.

• In a bid to smuggle 4 frozen goldfish from a family friend's garden in his wellies, he arrived home fashioning a sort of fish-paste-based-footwear.