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Imaginary homelands
There is remarkable depth in Zarina Hashmi's paintings to be put on show at Rohtas II from March 4
By Aasim Akhtar

[[center]] 
[[image]] drawing of India and surrounding ocean and lands (in black and white) [[/image]]
Zarina has attempted to find new ways of narrativising the imagined community of 'Indian experience'. [[/center]]

The terms 'refugee', 'exile', 'border', and' 'national identity' are intrinsic to the vocabulary of third world cultural and political debates. Contemporary concerns of any nature seem heightened in a region beset with conflicts between new associations and old identities. in such circumstances , homelessness, entailing the dramatic loss of power that goes with invisibility, are reinvented as a visible cultural contingent.

"Maps, Homes and Itineraries', an exhibition of woodcuts and chin-colle by Zarina Hashmi at Rohtas II in Lahore, consists of semi-auto-biographical witnessing (whether poeticised or narrated straightforward) of her peripatetic experience. It develops at the level of both absurdist comedy and storytelling. There is a slow but continual loosening of boundaries between art forms, and with it there has been a drive to involve the viewer as a witness or participant, not spectator. There is an undertow of disturbance  beneath the veneer of artistic control, a sense of some impending wild loosening and dishevelment. Nothing will erupt and break surface to shatter the order the artist establishes, but there is a tension that is painful, gripping and eloquent.

As a collective experience the exhibition tends to show the harrowing pictorial metaphors as the artist probes into aspects of contemporary sensibility in her work , and the technique rises above visual sensation. There is no struggle to create aesthetically inclined, self-contained, resplendent artifacts, but an urge to address the posthumous hubris of a self-ordained 'national identity'. The works created rise out of past shadows and recollections, the pangs of rebirth, and the sorrows of exile. What makes these works incisive and sardonic id the fact that Zarina wants to redeem the desecrated self to a fragmentary whole. The artist is not a casualty of the painful turbulence of 1947; instead she follows those who were disillusioned or mentally maimed for life. Nevertheless, as is evident in her bitter anguish, Zarina comprehends the violence concealed under the mask of law and order and the mechanism of the politics of scarcity. Amazed at the propensity for destruction of the political and social systems, the artist seeks valid images for experiences that have inwardly affected her.

In the multitude of works she has made over several decades, the India-born, New York City-based artist instills glimpsed gestures and unconnected locales with a surprising depth of meaning. Her images contain the casual distance of documentation but withhold the identity of place, person and event. These black and white depictions of landscapes and continents offer a view of awareness. These images function as her personal archive, one that she approaches from the point of view of a cultural anthropologist. She treats her work as an exploration of the intersection between the utopia of remembered places and the events and reality of the material world. Passages and incidental architectural spaces have long figured prominently in her work as symbols of transition, and they form the overarching metaphor of the project. For example in "City IX", New York City appears to be depicted with the help of two off-white vertical bands on a velvet-black ground.

The austerity and consistency of the format are mitigated by the image's seductive physicality. this draws in the viewer, who is rewarded with the experience of the work's subtle dissimilarities and the artist's impression of the Twin Towers — the vertically inclined bars may also act as dividers to signify the 6th Avenue that divides Manhattan into east and west, where the artist has been living for many years now.

Tactile areas are uniquely articulated by the faint geometry of the lines that have been delicately drawn on wood. In some works a straight line halts unexpectedly, while in others a similar line continues to the end along an established axis. Elsewhere, a barely perceptible arc falls within a drawn grid that has been deliberately situated well inside the perimeter of the print's surface.

Zarina's romantic faith in the pursuit of artistic truth has led her through a dizzying variety of forms and mediums. Her stubborn integrity has made her a consistently interesting and evolving artist and role model for a more ideal art world. Light on her feet, she has tempered the grand aspirations and heavy themes of her work and honour, iconoclasm and a healthy love for the absurd. She bypasses the pieties of postmodern thinking, and instead, with extraordinary subtlety and sophistication, rekindles old-fashioned mysteries.

The obsessive patterning of "City" series is taken to the limits in her tightly packed drawings. These consist of labyrinthine lines grouped to create an overall design of target-like concentric circles, often within rectangular frames. In the intricate drawings Zarina presents the work as a group of fragmentary glimpses of a territory uncomfortably occupied by two sets of irreconcilable desires and their submerged geometric forms invite close scrutiny and intimate contemplation. For example, the work entitled 'Bait-ul-Muqaddas'.

Strategies of visual communication also include the usage of words as images in Zarina's work. Names of each city and country written in Urdu — the language associated with the Muslims of India, in fact , questions issues of authorship and the mercurial nature of the artist's own identity. 

In the related body of work, 'Country', almost completely covered with continuous, meandering ink lines, reveal faint geometric forms in negative space. The results of Zarina's trance-like  actions are metaphorically rich. Twisted, improvisational pathways seem like representations of fate or charts of mood swings. The groups of lines also resemble fingerprint striations, suggesting similarly random, chaotic indexes of identity. In some of the drawings, the irregular, undulating shapes formed by the tonal variations suggest topographical maps, magnetic fields, rock formations, liquid stains or amoebic forms.

Zarina's 'Atlas of my world' series is essentially field samples of the places she has lived. The weight, texture, material, and the play of positive and negative spaces lend it a vital authenticity. Zarina's images linger in our consciousness like remembered dreams. This integration of Minimalist geometries with occasions for refined perception yields distinctive paintings that are mesmerising in their understated but palpable materiality. But the likelihood that the works will be received as 'self-portraits", as the artist intends them is highly questionable.

In the case of post Independence India, art is strongly characterised by a negotiation with modernism through regionalism as an archive of tradition and sense of place sets the limits. But to talk of tradition is not to talk of an anodyne, commercialised heritage, but a set of symbols and identities that continue to shape the boundaries of faith and cultural understanding. Traditional forms are not freely available for appropriation, but markers for continuing kinds of cultural and political assertion. In effect, the issue of indigenism — how traditions are used — becomes an issue of 'jargon of authenticity' to the increasing pressures of demodernisation.

The drawing up of battle lines over acceptable artistic practice has cut a swathe through that fragile alliance of secularised Indian artists who were engaged in post-nationalist/modernist dialectic. For it is one thing entering the benighted arena of the international art world with the knowledge that you are not entering as 'other' but as a voice amongst many, and another to return to your culture of origin as the representative of decadence and self-hatred.

Zarina Hashmi is an artist who can be described ad 'at the cutting edge of these conflicts'. Turning away from the traditional encounter between nationalist sign and modernist apparatus, to a programmatic avant-gardist concern with the semiotic potential of cultural materials, her work through the late 1980s bears witness to a greater sense of ideological mobility in contemporary art. That is, the earnest concern to simulate the signs of "Indianness" is absent, replaced by what might be called a politicalized intertextuality.

In a crucial way, Zarina has attempted to find new ways of narrativising the imagined community of 'Indian experience'. In this there is undoubtedly a continuity with the concerns of early post-Independence art: a recognition of place as a request for self-identity. However, in this instance, place is a space of contradiction and division, a space where 'Indianness' breaks down under the critique of ethnicity. The work then cuts across the old aesthetic opposition of vernacular/ethnic and modern to produce a set of political readings of communalism and the industrialisation of India.

What is particularly revealing about the work on show is its modern sense of melancholia. Melancholy implies an individual consciousness at odds with history. The subject knows that a imputed presence marks an unconscious loss and therefore refuses the blandishments of assimilation. For Indian artists, subject to the pressures of nationalist self-identity and modernist ambition, the idea of melancholy as a kind of homelessness has been reactive rather than critical. The matter of tastefulness is always a matter of wanting it both ways.

Zarina's work has dislodged the shackles of the nationalist/modernist dialectic, yet at the same time fails to cause the kind of disquiet that this move of necessity demands. This criticism of course is not a covert call for political explicitness. Rather, it is a matter of how the falling away from the certainties of tradition is effected that is how the imagined communities of regionalism and ethnicity are disordered. Zarina seems to fudge the issue, so the question of a critical homelessness for the secular artist is narrowed. Doing more than signaling this issue may, however, be an impossible demand in current circumstances. With the Hindu occultist revival and the ardour of Islamic fundamentalism, direct attacks on essentialist identities are hardly going to win many converts. Moreover, blood is spilt, and lives are lost over such matters. Yet a political avant-garde cannot take their instructions from the opposition, it has to be made clear that a struggle is being conducted on its own terms that some non-negotiable space is being created.

Transcription Notes:
Had to reopen because of many spelling mistakes make and then not corrected by reviewer. For instance: four mistakes in the top part of the transcription which should have been easily seen. There were no paragraph breaks.