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| Name of Publication | Place of Publication | Date of Publication|

| Financial Express | New Delhi |
30 Jan 2000 |

The Conceptual travels of Zarina Hashmi

Indian art is Indian art, anywhere in the world. This comes home to one when one looks at the graphics, bronzes and installations of New York bas Zarina Hashmi-one of the first Indian artists to be included in a museum collection in the US-that are being exhibited at the Gallery Espace.
To the superficial, Hashmi's work appears to be minimalist. But a closer looks shows a powerful narrative element flowing through her sequences. Take Courtyard/Entrance/Well/Home/Threshold/Door. It refers to her home in India, with its black door, a jutting threshold, a bricking-in-courtyard, a ground-plan - a narrative of a provincial Indian town with its enclosure, private spaces, public identities and conventional slotting of individuals into categories. Everything cut and dried, black and white.
Similarly, the sequence of Hot Breeze/Stillness/Afternoon/Dawn/Dew reflects the daily passage of time in the many small towns of UP and Madhya Pradesh, where time seems only to go through the circular motion of the blades of a ceiling fan(the image evoked in afternoon), but it still buts through the stillness and goes on with the force of a Hot Breeze, a title that reminds one of the film, Garam Hawa, by MS Sthyu, reminding one of a society torn apart along the lines drawn across our country by colonialism.
We get an inkling of the grid of colonial slots worked into out skins like tattoos in the sequence of Time/Border/Destination/Distance/Journey and Night/Dust/Country/Darkness/Despair/Language, where categories in all their rigid artificiality share a space with the ongoing processes of nature and the motion and flexibility that they exhibit. The artist seems to cry, but to the viewer, to reject these and discover the ongoing relation of humanity with its environment and processes of nature. Her capacity to create wheel-like "books" in bronze and paper shows how concepts like imbibing ideas and moving on in life can be synonymous.
Here indeed is an artist whose experience enriches her thought-process; and that in turn triggers off her creativity. This is an exhibition definitely worth a visit.
- Suneet Chopra

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