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Thursday, August 12, 1993

Zarina Hashmi: Return of the native

By Amra Ali

Zarina Hashmi, a print maker, returns to Karachi with a fresh series of etchings to be displayed at Chawkandi Art from August 24.

She works in New York and has recently been a visiting faculty member at the University of California. Zarina has established a place for herself and has come to terms with who she is- an Asian woman in the extremely competitive art world of New York.

Zarina's work is not new to those in Karachi who have been following her exhibitions held every few years at Chawkandi.

The etchings on show are the result of a six-week "artists in residence' grant sponsored by the Women Studio Workshop and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work is intense and follows a consistency that only be achieved by one having the coming from her work. Zarina's images are derived from folk elements like embroideries and carvings, etc. She is most of all, influenced by the laces, and displays a similar attention to detail and design that was given in creating them by the older women of yesteryears. These are the elements that have stayed with her evoking a strong bond within her.

Lisa Liebermann, writing on Zarina's work in the prestigious Art Forum magazine, says "Her metaphors...with their cultivated lack of finish and their suggestion of porousness of material breathing...are as open to any myth of creation as they are to poetics of decay."
The present work is in two series of etchings entitles The house with four alls and A house of many rooms. Each of ral part of each other.

The repetition of similar lines is a constant feature in all her works, and is in fact the key to understanding her art. Zarina traces its origin in Western art to Eastern sources like the simplicity of repeating the same words or phrases on the tasbih which, as one reads them, creates a new reality. The other example is in eastern music where the repetition of just one musical note can mesmerise the audience and bring them to the state of ecstasy. The repetition of stark black and white lines has a similar response.

In the series The house with many rooms the grid the repetitive element. Compared to her other works, this series is full of pain as is obvious from titles like Boundaries of despair. The image is a stark black with an illusion of the grid showing from underneath. The black projects a strong decisiveness