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FINE ART

By Dr. Akbar Naqvi
FROM INTIMATE SPEECH TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

After a couple of years, Sarina Hashmi exhibited her sophisticated, abstemious woodcuts under the title Maps, Homes and Iternaries at Karachi's Chawkandi Art last month. The strength of her prints is their fuqr or poverty. The term is genrally reserved for the pious but can also be used in a aesthetic sense. It is a way fo saying that less is more or tha art gains much from frugal means. Zarina's work also demonstrates that forms of modern art - minimalism in this case - can be adapted remarkably well to cultural conditions that are not necessarily its own. As Zarina left her home country and settled in the US, modern art became the companion of her diaspora and helped her reinvent herself and her culture. Whatever be the subject, this is the only meaningful discourse of art for her and other artists belonging to post colonial societies. The symbiosis between the formal values of an essentially western art form and the artists subjectivity - outsiders at home and abroad- has earth to show His countenance in the mirror of life, nature and the universe. Art is governed by a similar compulsion. Ghalib expresses the nature of revelation and communication in a couplet on a maiden in love: "Saadgi va purkari, be khudi va hushiari/Husn ko taghaful mein jurat azma paya." Similarly, Zarina's art gnerates its minimal amplitude in silence or with the help of spare signs and symbols as coquettishly as the innocent maiden. Ghalib attributes the unconsciously artful action of the maiden to love, Zarina's art is reticent, private and as innocuously artful as that of the maiden. It is not surprising that minimalism should have served Zarina so well, coming as she does from a traditional Muslim family. In the households of the ashraaf, good manners required that everyone speak softly and politely. A loud, impatient and quarrelsome voice indicated bad breeding. This aspect of Zarina's culture and upbringing has served her art well. In her recent work, however, Zarina appears to have moved from intimate speech to the political correctness favoured by the West. In this context, the artist has adder her own mild note of dissent against the human and cultural genocide rampant in the world today. What has perhaps been overlooked in the process, though, is that Zarina's art, by its very nature, does not permit protest of any kind. Earlier, Zarina had accultured modert art with the memories that accompanies her as she moved like a gypsy on a caravan from home to home. These prints were also maps of a kind, though not know to