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past in her memory, the only home she has known. Whereas in Giacometti, there is an ironic twist to the figure of a wheeling clown which hints at the existential angst of the image. Zarina is innocent of irony as a tool of intellectual distancing. She appears to be a stoic, one who would not see life as tragedy because her art does not go for the grand gesture of despair and defiance. The scale on which she seems to have worked is intimate and under control.
The second set of houses, she says, are a variation upon Brancusi's The Kiss. In sharp contrast to Rossetti's romantic and flowery narrative style, hers is in the nature of bailing out from tradition and old customs. The only possession she appears to have is her vow of visual poverty. In the words of the great French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, her house occupies the terrain of being. In this space, exile and freedom accord with the dialectics of life; voluntary nomads do grow roots in the air.
Each of Zarina's houses has a frozen narrative. What she "shed of non-essentials" lies veiled behind the insouciance of her images. Again, Bachelard strikes home with his words, "a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house." Zarina's house many not have an overt psychology but used as a metaphor it is pregnant with meaning.
Zarina's work may be seen in critic Quinten Bell's words are "psychomorphic design." The house images are geometric and totemic. The invite enquiries from viewers in eloquent silence, who can give them the body of their own experience and reminiscences. But Zarina would direct their attention, and to do this she has used titles of recall. The titles are displayed on the full page opposite the etchings. They could be deciphered against white, obliterating spaces, as if Zarina was embarassed with words but could not do without them. The titles anchored the images in our minds as Zarina's stories. Far Away was a House with Four Walls, was a design of utter denial of all human and cultural associations, but was dependent on words charged with nostalgia. The Black Snake Came in the House, On Long Summer Afternoons Everyone Slept and The One-eyed Maid went back to her childhood and girlhood in Aligarh.
What was noticeable, apart from the academic preciosity and pulsing energy of her style, was the use of words which, like mantras, opened doors to treasure hoards of personal memories and sentiments, making the house a veritable treasury. Words also revealed how introverted her art was. They were pressed, as in the minimal and conceptual arts, to mediate between the artist and the viewers. Those who knew her Aligarh of the past were with her. Others, not familiar with the basic foundation of an eastern house with an angan and service quarters around the square, could use the image to trigger their own memory.
A perceptive viewer said that Zarina was a book illustrator. She 

[[image in center right]] "Far away was a house with four walls"

readily agreed and pointed out that her house series etchings were portfolio pages. Reading, therefore, was central to her art, metaphorically and literally. What existed on paper took on full personal and cultural body when viewers read themselves into it to supply the missing link between art and existence. Any number of readings are possible. For example, ne could choose Zarina's interpretive authority or allow Bachelard the privilege of a learned guide. Zarina's images call for words to come to their rescue. She invites us to enjoy the contrapuntal passage between reading and seeing,
Zarina teaches etching in America. She is also a printmaker and papermaker of long experience. Her first foray into sculpture was in paper which she moulded from pulp. She now uses aluminum to cast her faceless houses. What impressed one most was her control over the medium. But pedagogic preciosity tolerated obvious mistakes by design and the artist's own occasional impatience with the stern demands of the discipline which fees and houses her. Zarina obviously knew the pitfalls of perfectionism. She had no use either for weighty trans-cultural statements, a la Zahurul Akhlaque, which Mansoora Hasan favours us with on her yearly junkets through Pakistan.
Zarina was asked if she subscribed to minimalism as one my surmise from the appearance of her works. She denied this and added that the absence of traditional images of her paintings was the result of a personal choice from experience. She believes in the wisdom that "less is more". If her work looked minimalist, this had nothing to do with fashion. Nomads carry minimal baggage on the move. Nomadism, physical and mental, is a post-colonial phenomenon, and Zarina is a part of the culture of self-exiled poets, intellectuals and artists who thrive on interpreting their own culture from a distance. Perhaps this gives them a sharper vision of thins but it also raises questions about their intimate touch with their land and its people. Zarina says that she is her own culture, meaning thereby that hers was a portmanteau culture packed up and ready to move at any time. This is why her sign is the house on wheels.

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