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FINE ART

By Dr. Akbar Naqvi

Discourse of Intimacy

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Country, 1999, Woodcut, 8x6 inches

When Zarina Hashmi last exhibited her work at Karachi's Chawkandi Art some seven years ago, there was on display a frieze of a carriage on wheels, repeated by the artist as the leitmotif of her nomadic life. The artist described the carriage as her version of Alberto Giacometti's attenuated man on his existential roll on two wheels. I missed to note then, in my review of her work in the Herald, that the wanderer was a post-modern Laila, who had to discard her richly-caparisoned camel litter to venture through the wilderness of a fabulously provisioned world. In the course of her journey, it was inevitable that she would be pulled up by memories from the past and realise [[realize]] that, all along on its roll, her art was leading her from acquired self-sufficiency to authentic self-knowledge.

This is not to say that Giacometti is irrelevant to Zarina's art. He is the point of departure from where the artist sets out to demarcate her subjectivity where she can be intimate with herself. Between Giacometti as her emblem of modern art and the woodcuts of the exhibition held last month at Chawkandi, is the terrain of all subcontinental artists. Like most of us, Zarina may not know who she really is, but sorting out one's memories can be a liberating experience.

The house on wheels signifying her nomadism occupies only a small part of her recent exhibition, and that too as a point of reference. The trajectory of Zarina's peripatetic life appears to have been taken over by the memories of a home which once was but is no more. Ironically, this disappearance of the house on wheels intensifies, almost to palpable degree, a remembered reality from across a long hiatus of time and distance.

Appropriately then, there is in the present exhibition, a series depicting the outlines of a house or ghar in Aligarh in which the artist was born and raised. Zarina calls her home a haveli, even though it was a modified form of a bungalow. The term haveli is generic and only what it contains is personal. For those who know Urdu, the cultural overtones of the word resonate with the promise of a veritable storehouse of memories. Zarina recalls what she wants to remember of the romance of a way of life. The

The Herald, October 2000     131