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has a wide knowledge of global art developments and very definite opinions. Talking about her work Zarina said: 

"I have always been apart from the mainstream. This in a way is a disadvantage if you consider I have never been on the gallery circuit. By taking part in group exhibitions and living in New York as part of the scene, galleries got to know what I was doing. My exhibitions have not been due to any PR effort of mine, but to the hours, sheer effort and emotions invested in my work. That speaks for itself." (Zarina's first major art review in the States was a three page spread written by Liza Liebman, in the prestigious Art Forum Magazine in '88. Since then there have been numerous positive reviews and critiques from diverse publications. Putting them together, it appears that the artist's work taps into a primal, universal instinct). 

"You're talking about a long time ago. There has been a lot going on since then. Recently my work was covered by Art in America, then the South Asian Exhibition at Queens Museum got a lot of attention from many other magazines, and the New York Times. The gallery I am showing my work in, next November, is in Chelsea, New York; a small gallery known as Admit One. Now the art scene has moved from Soho to Chelsea. 

M.H: You have always been obsessively 'work-centred.' You have to do it. Whether your journeying has taken you to Japan, Bangkok, Paris, or other areas, nothing has prevented you from continuing a hard, self-imposed, training. Almost like a religious itinerant searching for enlightenment. 

"I keep on working. I get up in the morning and I start, because apart from the creative ideas there are a lot of processes. My work comes out of process and it's very labour intensive. So even when aesthetic problems are resolved, the work is there. This present series, Home is a Foreign Place, took me a year and a half to prepare.... I can't separate the making of art and the idea. Kandinsky said "...relished by the eyes and made by hand..." so you have to handle it, my hand has to show in the work. This present series I had already started to think about when I was in Santa Cruz, I was going through this trial, and I thought 'what is home, where is home'. (Zarina had been in a dispute with her landlord over her New York studio of twenty-five years. The landlord was keen to sell the vacated apartment to property developers. Zarina won the case and is presently living in the studio in New York). 

"When I'm in New York I think of home as Aligarh, and when I'm here I always say I'm going home to New York. I've been out of India for forty-two years, so I come and go. You don't think of a place as home when you're in it. You think of it when you are away from it, so 'home' is always in a foreign place.

"When I went to Delhi with my exhibition, I suddenly realized that sitting in New York, 'Home' was seven thousand miles away. In Delhi, the place I called home was only 80 miles away. So I thought I might as well go and see the places I had talked about; the door, the courtyard and all. When I got there, 'Home' was not there anymore. The garden was not there, the fan was not there. Then I understood people die, and homes die, there are different kinds of death, some through war and destruction, some through natural death. And I thought, 'this home is dead', so I closed the book. This present exhibition is my last home series. The final print will be picked up in my next sequence, Borders." 

There is a high degree of personal involvement in Zarina's work, she doesn't hand over to machines, she is in control of every process of the work. 

"You have an idea in your mind but it often turns out different, because the medium takes over. I never impose on my medium, it translates my idea. If you carve woodblocks, they will give you prints very different from those produced from metal plates. The chisel marks should be visible, I don't hide them, so when you look at it, you know an artist was there, my tools were there. In this age of high technology, I'm using a very low-tech printmaking technique. I take out prints by rubbing by hand, the oldest method of making an impression, or using rollers. 

"For this exhibition I carved about 50 blocks, but after editing I used only 36 of them. I feel that my work is becoming lighter and lighter such as the cut paper, and the tiny forms (houses) hung in clusters on the walls at the Queen's Museum show. There is a fine wire construction, bent into a house shape and strung with linen thread which is exactly the same width as the wire. The wire has rigidity and the thread has flexibility. I call it 'Hanging in There'. At the Chawkandi Art Gallery, I am showing 36 prints and 4 floor plans, like blue-prints of the homes I have lived in. They are also somehow a part of the same narrative." (These are linear, woodblock print-casts printed on incredibly fine paper. Zarina explained that she carved them from a city map spread over the block). 

The millennium began well with five exhibitions in the pipeline. One at Espace Gallery, Delhi in January, Chawkandi Art, inn New York at the Admit One gallery, and one she is particularly looking forward to: a ten year retrospective to be held at Mills College for Women in Oakland, California. Then Bombay, and Delhi is asking for another show...

M.H: Considering all the paths you have taken, all the experiences, do you think that you would have articulated your work in a similar way if you had stayed in Delhi?

"Work is a reflection of your life and your experience, if I had stayed in India, my work would have been very different. My present work is a reflection of what I saw, where I was, what I felt, what I experienced living in different places. It's all about finding your own centre. I need a lot of time for my work. There is no such thing as a weekend, I work 7 days a week.

(Talking about art trends in New York)

"When galleries are selecting artists, they will only select women who are out of the main medium, not in painting or drawing. It would be conceptual art or photography, video or construction. Regular painting is still considered a man's domain, figures are back, but bad figures. It's actually a reaction. Just as minimalism was a reaction to expressionism, then came conceptual art, now there's a genre of bad painting, kitsch. Big eyed children, flat backgrounds, like Granny's paintings sold in garage sales. It's a reaction against the arrogance of artists' who looked down on general public taste. Now there's a young group of artists who wants to be part of the people, not part of an intellectual elite. In this context, a well-known art critic in New York, Harvardina Pindell, recently said in a lecture she gave: '....we'll be known as the generation who left behind Mickey Mouse' and it's amazing how many Mickey Mouse painters are around."

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The Review, DAWN, August 31-September 6, 2000    17