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Moon in woodcut

Culture agenda

By Marjorie Husain

Zarina Hashmi in exhibition

Zarina's recent exhibition entitled 'Home is a Foreign Place'  reflects the changes in her life where her aesthetic focus is on a theme based on steadfast love

All forms evoke associations buried deep in our memories. Artist Zarina Hashmi, living away from her childhood home for forty years, refurbishes the associations and the memories in sequences of prints and sculpture. The narration takes into consideration the counterpoint between two significant elements of East and West: the minimalism, sense of space, and timelessness found in Zen philosophy, and the classic references to Western art history as found in Klee's dancing line. Zarin's medium gracefully absorbs these divergent phenomena which in her skilled hands become an aesthetic metaphor for an invisible but nonetheless existent, umbilical cord. One that binds the artist to her eastern roots. 

Using metal sculpture, cast paper, collage, etching and woodblock cast prints, Zarina deploys fragmented images of past experience as an idiom that suggests other 'confrontations'. The haunting analofy that runs through her work: "...distance is measured from the place that was home," is continued in the final series on this theme, Home is a Foreign Place, exhibited at Chawkandi Art.

Imagery that art connoisseurs in Karachi recognize as relating to Zarina's work are present, the starry night skies, rain, elements of house and garden exquisitely rendered in woodblock cast prints. It is an exhibition that follows another, enthusiastically received, well-reviewed show in New Delhi, held at the Espace gallery in January 2000. This series, Zarina insists, closes the chapter.

For almost twenty five years she has lived in America, Zarina has been based in New York where she now has a coterie of distinguished friends and admirers from prevailing art circles. Robert Kimbral, writing on her current exhibition, described the 36 woodblock print casts as "both abstract and narrative set specifically in memory by recollection of words... No-one can say how such allusive richness can be caught in such simple geometric forms."

Zarina's eventful life has been full of change, perhaps this factor has influenced her aesthetic focus on a theme linked with steadfast love and sameness: 'Home'. Choosing a life centred [[centered]]in art, she learnt to live with very little while subjecting herself to the discipline of a learning process that led her through Japan, Thailand, Europe and America. She arrived in New York in the 80s without friends or resources. TO suppress her loneliness, she wove embroidery threads through prints, a link to childhood memories of her mother's sewing circles in Aligarh. She began to meet other artists, and became an active member of the Feminist movement. New York was exciting but her work dominated her life and continues to do so. 

Talking to the artist is a stimulating experience, she

16      The Review, DAWN, August - September 6, 2000