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PROFILE

New York, I had no idea that I was coming to live here forever". The ultimatum of that fact took several years to dawn upon her. The obsession with home continues with Moving House (1991), House on Wheels (1992) and more recently in The House that Flew Away (1997), each of these cast in aluminum and the last in bronze. Despite the sense of permanence of the medium, she raises the question of impermanence through her titles. It manifests itself in a series of etchings in a group show held at Gallery Nature Morte in 1997. Titled Homes I Made/ A Life in Nine Lines, these take the form of a grid pla of the nine grouped together. Each of them demarcates the different floor plans of her homes in nine different destinations, and each of them carries the imprint of her personal recall: Bangkok, New Delhi (I Planted a Garden of Roses), Paris, New Delhi (A Room of My Own), Bonn (An Uncertain Air), Tokyo, Los Angeles (Edge of Temporariness), Santa Cruz and New York (A Space to Hide Forever). There is thus established a sense of sameness, yet of difference because it was never the same. Through these floor plans which are grouped together, she speaks of disruption, disjuncture, unsettlement.
The theme of settlement and shelters, of plural identities for those who migrate from one country to another has assumed international implications, to become a subject of study, debate, writings and also, art. It would be easy to read these concerns into Hashmi's work since sentimental, this essay simulates and attempts to construct in similar fashion, the 'factual data' in all its brevity of word and line. The harsh rigour of this geometry is in conflict with emotions and feelings brought out by the words which Hashmi inscribes below the etchings and woodcuts, like a poet might do. That she reads and enjoys poetry is manifest in the series where she quotes from Faiz. Her inscriptions are sometimes in Urdu and sometimes in English - inferring that duality of identity which is hers, as much as it is of many others who migrate from one country to another.
Yet, in the end, her work, despite its abstraction from form and feeling, is not without poetry. Some of her series in the present exhibition transcend the notion of home and they 'read' like a haiku poem, exploring that exquisite quality of a mood, of those several elements which compose Morning, Afternoon and Evening. Night for instance, opens with that intensity of blackness dissected into two by a slender horizontal line, as you lie sleeping, dreaming. Darkness descends like a pitch of despair, a nightmare. It is at night that you reflect upon the plurality of Language, of the plurality of voices - leading to Despair which shatters the stillness of Night, erupting like volatile fireworks, emotions which explode. She traces this despair then, to the root cause of belonging to a hundred myriad voices of the Country, flickering in the night and fleeting. When the Night passes and Despair settles down, all that remains is Dust.
if Morning is divided into two halves

[[image]] [[caption]] House of Many Rooms. Etching with Chine Colle. 1993. 9 x 8 inches [[/caption]][[image]] [[caption]] Country. Woodcut. A unit of a set of 6 prints. 1999. 16 x 13 inches. Images courtesy the author and Gallery Espace, New Delhi. [[/caption]] [[image]] [[caption]] Displaced Homes/ Displaced People. Printed paper and string. 1999. 50 units. [[/caption]]

she is today an artist of international repute. Her work, as the catalogue mentions, addresses itself to political issues of universal relevance today. However, inscribed into her stylistic is the element of personal memory, an attempt to recreate her own past - through words and through lines. In keeping with her temperament, this world is defined in a dry, matter-of-fact way, confining itself to the definition of squares and triangles, diagonals and verticals, of empty spaces which mirror that sense of emptiness. And, in keeping with her approach to work as being de rigeur and non-by a horizontal, Evening is divided into light and shade by a vertical. And Shadows play stretching out, clouds gather, the Dust Storm is a thousand specks in the sky like the unfolding of stars in the cosmos. Rain descends after the storm and the Fragrance rises from the earth like flower buds strung together into a garland. 
In this group of works there is a promise of a world that moves beyond the scope of the House on Wheels into the infinite universe, beyond the personal sense of solitariness into sharing emotions, beyond spaces into time. 

THE ART NEWS MAGAZINE OF INDIA VOL. V ISSUE 1 35