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F I N E  A R T

By Dr Akbar Naqvi

The House That Zarina Built

Zarina Hashmi's houses in etchings and sculpture are a shelter, even a home. but are marked with the vagrancy of the inhabitant...

The exhibition under review deals with the house as interpreted by Zarina Hashmi on view at the Chawkandi Art Gallery from August 24 to September 4. Zarina's house is a shelter, even a home, but marked with the vagrancy of its inhabitant. Not the house of classic and cubist provenance, but a Jungian archetype which expresses itself, but its very nature, in abstract signs and arcane symbols. 

[[image]]
Packed and ready to go: the house on wheels

Zarina's image is skeletal, stripped visually of anecdotes, description, and emotional association. It binds her to her past even as it reminds her of separations and distances. It gives her freedom to change houses, live her own life, 

[[image]]
"On long summer afternoons everyone slept"

and to express herself. The stopovers from house to house are many. But, like punctuation marks, they help to give grammatical order to the full flow of her wanderings. The story is told in sign language in her etchings and houses of cast aluminium, in a style which is wed to silence.

There were actually two exhibitions in one. The etchings were a rare feast for the eyes, something one has not enjoyed since Sadequain etched the crow-nested head of his own double (hamzad) in the sixties. Then there were the sculptures, small toy-like metal cubes with triangular tops on wheels. They were arranged serially in neat lines against white boards. Another set of houses metamorphosed to look like embracing couples, reminded one of pre-Raphaelite painting of the heavily cloaked Dante and Beatrice by Rossetti. Zarina said that Giacometti's stretched man on two wheels could have been her subliminal promptings for the house on wheels as some kind of an anthropid.

But she also added that the wheels of the primordial Moenjodaro bullock cart have been a long-time fascination with her.

The wheel is a mandala of time and change. The great English poet Eliot sang about time present and past, wheeling one upon the other. The future in this dance is fortuitous. Zarina has moved away from her land and people to far and strange lands, but she wheels back to her 

The Herald, September 1993