Radhika Khimji and the art of freedom

A SKINNY LITTLE fish of indeterminate colour, the Garra barreimiae lives in the freshwater lakes of the Al-Hajar mountain range in Oman. When it is young it can see, but as it ages a layer of skin grows over its eyes and it gradually becomes blind. Every year the blind fish of Oman draw thousands of tourists to the Al Hoota cave, a five-kilometre cavern of rocky grottoes and watery depths. Under strings of electric lights, men in white robes and women with covered heads inch along walkways and peer into the dark water. For Radhika Khimji, a 42-year-old Omani artist now living between London and Muscat, the challenge in the cave was less to spot the Garra than to imagine its world.