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LUHRING AUGUSTINE 531 West 24th Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 206 9100 fax 212 206 9055 www.luhringaugustine.com 2004? Lutzer-Milford, Mary-Ann. "Cities, Countries and Borders: Recent Work by Zarina Hashmi." Cities, Countries and Borders Recent Work by Zarina Hashmi Splintered, fractured maps, diagrams, designs, yantras, schematic, angular, black and white. Zarina describes a world in her prints that is unpeopled yet it is a world that resonates with the most basic of human emotions of needing to know where one belongs. She questions identity, the meaning of home, the desire for roots, in an entirely abstract way, and in her most recent series of prints, Cities, Countries and Borders, she questions the very notion of safety, security and refuge. Since 1991, each year she has produced a series of prints that raise questions concerning the idea of home. In, A house with Four Walls, just a few lines evoke her memories of childhood lived within the security of four walls. But, there are cracks in those walls. There are ominous signs that problems will unfold. These turn out to be harbingers of her life which she has spent traveling the world since she left India as a young, married woman. The India she left was divided and scarred country. The places she moved gave her insights into different worlds and different futures. Her way of giving order to her peripatetic life was through maps. Thus the schematic drawings of her home in Aligarh developed into free-form maps that she would draw to orient herself as she sought out ancient temples in Cambodia, monuments in Thailand, or neighbourhoods in Paris. Following guidebook instructions, she would chart her own idiosyncratic and distinctive plans. Cities, Countries and Borders is a series of maps of nine cities that have been destroyed, violated and in some instances obliterated. Five countries complement the cities, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Holy Land. Each black and white map is a woodcut, a medium which has a history associated with forms of protest art that was used by the German Expressionists, Mexican political artists, and Chinese revolutionary artists in the 1920s and 1930s. In black and white, is without shadows or layers, the message of the prints in direct and straightforward: to provide grim records of senseless destruction and violence. Yet Zarina's characteristic spare monochromatic approach distances the events as reality. For her hope is in the memory of the event, the drawing of the places and the recording of the names in Urdu in elegant Nastaliq calligraphy. Use of Urdu is also homage to the foreign language of India, which was meant to be means of communication for the people of India. Maps are sometimes all that remain of ancient cities. They can describe arbitrary borders that are continually changing according to political exigencies. When maps are non-existent there are often no records of habitation. It is as if whole communities never existed. Who remembers, or has ever heard of Srebrenica? The fate of Srebrenica could be the fate of any city, a place blotted into wilderness by the deliberate massacre of those who sought refuge there. Cities torn apart by internecine fighting, by violence, by terrorism. Grozny The first map is of Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya. Its Chechen name was Djohar, which means gem. A jewel, that summons up visions of a beautiful, fertile place full of fruit trees, flowers, and a rich culture. There are two versions of this print: one is white with black lines; the other is reversed with white lines on a black background. It is a crazed map that has an appearance of an object having been dropped into the centre of a ceramic bowl, only the centre is that of the city where the fragments cling to the curves of the river that flows through its ancient heart. Sarajevo The city is in a valley surrounded by hills. The shooting was from the hills down into the valley. Irregular white lines that become black as they leave the urban environs dissect the city. Black
