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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Showcasing Cultures - A Closer Look

[image] View of installation at the Mills Art Museum. Photo courtesy Mills Art Museum and Hashmi.
[image] Crawling House (detail). Cut and folded tin. 1994.
[image] On Long Summer Afternoons Everyone Slept. Etching with text. 1991.

2001

Set within the discourse around Asian-American diaspora, Zarina Hashmi's prints and installations of the last ten years exhibited under the title Mapping a Life consolidate the artist's reflections on the theme of home and identity, leading to questions of place, location, displacement, migration, belonging, and loss. Like many other diasporic artists who have left their homeland, her work places a premium on recollection, reflection, and on memory of a place, that acts as a reminder of identity within the discussion around immigrant experience. Zarina brings forth insights into the issues peculiar to her position as a woman artist placed between the margins of two cultures - and the complex negotiations between her gender, religious, national, and transnational identity. Held at the art museum at Mills College in California and guest-curated by Mary Ann Milford Lutzker, her exhibition found immediate resonance in a nation of immigrants, and among the audiences of the culturally diverse San Francisco Bay Area.

In abstraction, memory facilitates the portability of experiences of a specific place and time. In this instance, it works through the economy of poetry and geometry, the two cores of Zarina's artistic expression. Home for Zarina is her father's house in Aligarh where she spent her formative years and which she left not knowing she would never return. This home, is essentially preserved in her stark outlines and the inscriptions of the past on architectural plans that trace footprints now lost forever.

It has been easy for western observers to include Zarina's austere abstractions within the rubric of New York's Minimalism. However there lies the problem  of rather over simplified reading of her work, suppressing its complexity and flattening the layers of cultural referencing and meaning. Zarina's work demands more than an essentialised assessment of her formal language as abstract and minimal. The intensely evocative prints that behave as autobiographical pages from a diary, have images interlaced with text in her mother tongue, Urdu. Adherence to restraint denies any immediate visible cultural signification, and though intrigued, I can imagine, the difficulty on the part of the viewer to engage with the unfamiliar, foreign cultural context of which little is known in this part of the world. The inscrutability of the language integral to the image mystifies it further, placing demand on the view to invest time to excavate the deeper layers of cultural meaning in order to appreciate her 'voice of difference'.

This exhibition raises another important concern, which refers to a problem that Sarat Maharaj has written extensively about - the 'untranslatability of the Other'. The emigre artist articulates in a source language and  translates the concept a second time into the material of the language in which she renders the work. More than the impossibilities/limits of translation, this process of working highlights the dimensions of what gets lost in translation. Though Zarina struggles to find English equivalents to the Urdu titles, the precise emotion is hardly aroused by subtitles in English.

The source of Zarina's imagery lies in her memory, or deeper in the folds between the unconscious and subconscious, the storehouse of myths and stories of her childhood, and in the art/architecture of her culture that she constantly reverts to and plays out against her current experience. The House on Wheels evokes the memory of the taaziah, a mobile structure built during muharram to resemble the martyr's tomb. These works have superimposed layers of meanings - migrations, mobility, temporality, flight, freedom and risk.

Zarina's art is bound to pose a challenge to the western viewer who will be provoked into relating to the work beyond its aesthetic and obvious qualities. - R.K.