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LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 WEST 24TH ST NEW YORK 10011

Nagy, Peter.
"Zarina Hashmi: Cities, Countries & Borders"
Art Asia Pacific
Summer 2004, pp. 81-82

Zarina Hashmi "CITIES, COUNTRIES & BORDERS"
Gallery Espace

A long-time resident of New York City, Zarina Hashmi was born into pre-Partition India and since 1947 has lived in a number of cities throughout the world. This identification with dislocation has been an on-goin preoccupation of her art, predominantly print making with occasional forays into sculpture. Hashmi most usually develops an idea into a set of prints (woodcuts being her forte) that not only successfully elaborates that idea but also enables the works to take on the attributes of book pages or even posters for the street (her characteristic sinewy lines remind one of expressionistic agit-prop art from the past).

While earlier series of works focused on architectural plans and lyrical abstractions, both of a decidedly autobiographical bent, her most recent exhibition celebrated a cartographic approach to communicate subtle political statements. The show's signature set of Prints ("Cities, 

[[image]] Zarina Hashmi New York  2003 Woodcuts and Text printed in black on Okawara paper, mounted on Somerset paper 8.50" X 7.75" Edition: 20

Countries & Borders" of 2003) zeroed in on a number of cities which have recently witnessed programmatic violence against Muslim communities: Grozny, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Beirut, Jenin, Baghdad, Kabul and Ahmedabad. To the artist's credit, she does nothing to "Islamicize" the maps of these cities, allowing their borders, avenues and rivers to stand as innocent and mute records of the traumas that have been inflicted upon them. Again, the impact of her project comes from the cumulative effect of the successive images int he series, which gently guide the viewer toward an intended message.

Several individual prints were minimalistic abstractions, illustrating how accustomed we have become to the reductivist extremes of, say, a Barnett Newman or a Donald Judd, in the sense that we can now easily project emotive content onto such images. Horizon from 2001 simply bisects a horizontal length of handmade Nepalese paper, a word in Urdu floating delicately at its center. This word, ufuq, could be translated as "horizon" but also as "distant lands" or "far away countries." Dividing Line terrain of hesitant cross-hatching remarkably similar on either side. Another print of only two vertical black bards holds in its margins the words "New York New York" translated into Urdu. Throughout the works on view, Hashmi's touch is light, her focus steady, and the complexities of her personal allegiances rendered palpable. - PETER NAGY

[[image]] Zarina Hashmi Dividing Line 2001 Woodcut printed in black on handmade Indian paper 17" X 12" Edition: 20