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“My work is not about the medium—it is about a concept. I begin with the word, not the image.”
- ZARINA HASHMI

Zarina Hashmi, who preferred to be known as simply ‘Zarina’, bore witness to the harrowing events of the Partition of India at a tender age of 10. This deeply impactful experience kindled within her a profound fascination with the intricate politics of home, space, and migration-themes that would come to define her... “My work is not about the medium—it is about a concept. I begin with the word, not the image.”
- ZARINA HASHMI

Zarina Hashmi, who preferred to be known as simply ‘Zarina’, bore witness to the harrowing events of the Partition of India at a tender age of 10. This deeply impactful experience kindled within her a profound fascination with the intricate politics of home, space, and migration-themes that would come to define her illustrious artistic journey that spanned several decades.

Zarina began working with printmaking in the 1960s, experimenting and exploring different materials during her travels to Bangkok, India, Paris, Japan, and New York. In New York, she was part of and engaged deeply with a community of women artists. She greatly appreciated the works of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Nancy Graves. It was especially Agnes Martin’s works that left an indelible mark on the artist’s own works.

“Zarina describes a world in her prints that is unpeopled yet it is a world that resonates with the most basic of human emotions of needing to know where one belongs.” (Mary-Ann Lutzer-Milford, Cities, Countries and Borders: Prints by Zarina, Bombay and New Delhi: Gallery Chemould and Gallery Espace, 2004) Her abstracted aesthetic, dense with meaning, weaves a poetics of space and reflects on the politics of cultural migration, making her works both personal and political. Her portfolios of prints are intended to come together to narrate her autobiography. Road Lines, 1996, are prints about Zarina’s annual journeys, shuttling between her New York studio, her faculty residence in Santa Cruz, and her visits to her elderly parents in Karachi. The “portfolio of four etchings is marked by two prints with staccato lines that construct the mile after mile journey across this vast country ending in two prints, the first with only two vertical parallel lines that bifurcate the white field, and the last a series of short black lines in a row perhaps signifying the all too frequent trips back and forth. Road Lines ends with a couplet from an Urdu poem by [Allama Muhammad] lqbal. “One who broke away from the caravan and got disillusioned by the faith.” These portfolios reflect the aesthetics of prudence that characterizes all of her work no matter what the mediums she chooses.” (Joyce Brodsky, “The Imprint of a Transnational Life”, Zarina: Weaving Memory, Mumbai: Bodhi Art, 2007)

River of Tears, 2007, is an important work where Zarina recasts the vestiges of her memory of the Partition. Employing a distinct execution for her otherwise geometric vocabulary, she strings together a lustre of pearls allowed to flow, as she expresses, “It was like a river of tears for millions of people who had to leave their homes and settle in a new place.” (Katherine Muhlenkamp, “Artistic Tapestry,” The University of Chicago Magazine, 2013, online)

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