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EXPRESS Newsline NEW DELHI THURSDAY JANUARY 20, 2000 [[image]] Home is ELSEWHERE [[image]] FREE WHEELIN': Zarina's (top) Home on Wheels (above) and Displaced People & Homes [[image]] Home for Zarina is 7438 miles away. This is roughly the distance between New York and Aligarh as it spreads out on a sheet of paper. But the question which arises is, at which end of the distance is the home? Is it in the rented apartment in New York for which she fought a court case against eviction and actually won? Or is it the home at Aligarh where she grew up gazing at the stars and the moon? Finding it difficult to answer the question, Zarina just says: Home is a Foreign Place. This is the name of her show of of woodcuts and aluminium cast installation on display at Gallery Espace till February 2. "Well, it works out both ways. One has made a home in a foreign place. And the place that was home is foreign too. But sometimes critics abroad try to see a question of a displaced identity. It is certainly not that. I have no problems of identity. Nor is it the Western preconception that home was purdah or prison. I tell them we grew up in a home which did not shut the outside. It gave us the freedom to dream and reach out," says Zarina. Home has been a recurring motif in her work with a sculptural purity as the keyword. A bachelor of science in mathematics from Aligarh, Zarina married an Indian diplomat and moved from country to country making a home wherever she went and it is this mobility which makes her cast a Home on Wheels. She first studied print-making with Stanley W. Hayter at his Atelier 17 in Paris. And also in Thailand, West Germany and Japan. Commenting on her work, Akbar Nadvi says that her home is "not the house of classic and cubist provenance, but a Jungian archetype which expresses itself by its very nature, in abstract signs and arcane symbols". In 1994, she held an exhibition, Home I Made in the University of California. "It included floor plans of the different houses that I lived in. I own a house nowhere. I don't feel the need for it. The years of total isolation and panic from being away from all I knew made me create my own homes, my spaces to hide," she says. At the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York she held a show called House with Four Walls taking up the concept of Chardiwari. And now at Espace, she says Home is a Foreign Place but the journey is once again to the Aligarh home. "Revisiting the house - the old wooden door painted black. Stepping over the threshold into the same entrance - then the vast courtyard with its terracotta floor - enclosed within four walls. Within which my world revolved. Here I looked at the sky, imagined the earth, closed my eyes to the scorching sun and counted the stages of the moon. I looked at the stars and knew that all worlds have their pre-destined axis and orbit where they revolve". In this show there is a very creative use of text calligraphed in Urdu with titles such as Watan, Ghar, Chand, Manzil or Subah. Meer her in the little room in the India International Centre, and she is planning a day-long geographical visit to Aligarh although the memory lanes are never geographical. And she is also poetic for one cannot be home and not recall the poetry of those times. So it is the Partition poem by Faiz of which she recites a few lines: Woh daadh-daagh ujaala, Woh shab-ghuzida sehar, Intezar thha jiska yeh woh sehara to nahin..." Of her works she says, "I like to make portfolios for I like to build a narrative and reach my own work. A print belongs to an album and not the wall. In our tradition, hanging paintings on the walls comes very late. Even the miniature paintings were kept in folders," she says. And thus the narrative continues and her image of the home assumes a larger meaning in an installation for the Millennium Show at Mumbai where she exhibited her work called Displaced Persons, Displaced Homes. The real home, of course, is elsewhere... - NIRUPAMA DUTT
