Viewing page 15 of 117

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Sunday, January 23, 2000   An honest memory of home - [23/01/2000] - The Hindustan Times

THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
Online

Last Updated[METRO]01:35 IST | Sunday, January 23, 2000, New Delhi

An honest memory of home

Zarina Hashmi tells Akshaya Mukul how she is trying to make sense of her life.

At 67, Zarina Hashmi is finally reconciled to her homeless status. The only home she ever knew was her father's in Aligarh, where she spent her childhood. Despite living in different parts of the world since then, the memory of Aligarh still haunts – the layout of the house, the life spent there, the sky under which she dreamed her first dreams, and the poetry she heard from her mother.

[[left margin]] S [[/left margin]]

These memories form the leitmotif of her abstract art. Nostalgia? Zarina disagrees. "I'm trying to make sense of my life," she says. Perhaps she's attempting to locate herself in the Indian diaspora in the US. Not easy, but Zarina successfully achieves this in her 36 woodcut prints, two accordion books, and a set of nine houses on wheels currently on display at Gallery Escape.

With evocative captions like Night, Darkness, Despair, Dust, Language Country, Home, Threshold, Wall, Doors, Entrance, Distance, etc, her work has a lyrical quality. So when she revists her childhood house, Zarina is more interested in expressing her old feelings associated with it instead of merely redrawing the structure. 

"A few years ago, I did exhibit the floor plan of my father's house," she says. But since then, the architectural dimension has given way to ideas and memories that emerged from that dwelling. Never mind the different places she has lived in, Zarina measures distances from the place that was home, and not from where she is residing.

[[left margin]] M [[/left margin]]

Zarina believes in working in small formats. A great votary of miniature art the traditional size of that style continues to hold her. Her work also makes a feminist statement. Since the early Seventies, she has been a part of the movement in the US working actively among women of the Third World. She believes that images of home in her art can only be perceived by a woman. "After all, it's they who turn a house into a home and live a better part of life inside it. Men have the whole world to conquer," she explains. This shows in her works – the colour of threads in her prints distinguishes night from day, portrays anxiety and despair borne out of darkness and long shadows of the evening, of clouds promising rain, and dust storms threatening to blow away the clouds. A short straight line sums up the long distance between Aligarh and New York.

She has also not forgotten the influence of Urdu, a neglected language now, which finds pride of place in all her works. "I want to be preserved at least in my works," she says with concern. Her works reminds you of Nasreen Mohemmadi's abstraction; the crucial difference lies in Zarina's style of understanding her state of mind.

Zarina's biggest asset is her honesty. Though firmly entrenched in New York's art world, she doesn't make tall claims often about Indian art. "Frankly, no one is really bothered. Indian art is seen and bought mainly by the NRI community. Right now, the only outside art making waves is Latin American." The only Indian artist who matters, she says is Anish Kapoor. "But then how Indian is he?" she asks, obviously hinting that Kapoor left India long ago and grew up imbibing western art flowers. But she feels anonymity int he US allows artists like herself to pursue art relentlessly and passionately. Since the Eighties, she has been doing aluminium and bronze sculptures. Exiled she may be at her 'new home', but the artist in her continues to grow and evolve.