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no figures to lend narrative content nor colour to distract the eye and shuns the grandiose for the interior view. Everything proceeds at a distance, on the other side of the reed chilman or blind-pull unfurled to keep out the loo or hot, dry breeze of the Indian summers. Yet her spare configurations are capable of packing in a veritable army of intensifiers that deliver a rush of feeling ans speak volumes without as much as a hint of garrulity.
What is the secret behind this extreme expressiveness? On what mehwar or axis do Zarina's disarmingly simple arrangements of squares, circles, triangles and verticals turn to appropriate the resonance of exquisitely phrased utterances? It has been easy for many observers to retrofit Zarina's work within the rubric of minimalism, a style that originated in the US during the 1960s, and attribute its visual elocution to an aesthetic borrowed from its major western proponents. A touch of Frank Stella here or is it something from Carl Andre, many are known to have quipped. Besides assigning misleading provenance, such a reading amounts to a dumbing down, flattening out the multi-skinned complexities and nuances of Zarina's output to a facile reductionism.
But Zarina's elegant restraint and sense of measure is not simply a matter of style, tailored to a particular moment of taste or connoisseurship. On the contrary, it comes from deeper wells, for in Zarina's case art does not merely imitate life but becomes a record of its markers. Like many other diasporic artists who have left her birthplace, Zarina's work places a premium on recollection and traverses and immense land mass of referencing as if to forestall the loss of home, history and culture. Every square inch of staccato line that she 
[[a picture of a woman sitting in a chair with a mostly white background behind her with what seems to be a frame with a horizontal black line surrounded by white in the rest of the frame.]]
incises on wood or copper plate and then transfers to paper is saturated with her past.
There are no set pieces her, Manet be praised. What we have instead is a knotwork of memory and elegy, unskeining which you will chance upon the spool that is Zarina's life. Here are childhood stories set in a far away house with four walls: about the superstitious one-eyed maid who advised the family to leave home on hearing the owl hoot among the trees. Or the time when a grass snake sought refuge in the house following the rains. Also intertwined are flashes of family members, either deceased or separated: Zarina's mother awaiting the motia blossoms in the evening or brother Aslam spinning one of his inimitable yarns.
In stark contrast to these innocuous recollections are her musings on the division of the subcontinent that tore apart, unfairly and arbitrarily, Zarina believes, a people with a shared ethos. In a subtly revealing articulation of this stance, Zarina renders the map of Hindustan- rather than India, please note- in her series Atlas of My World with an odd swiggly line to demarcate the border between India and Pakistan, which on close inspection resembles an unravelled thread from a knitted piece of cloth. The same line, though enlarged and depicted sans all other cartographic markings, resurfaces in another print called The Dividing Line. Any further explication would be an affront to Zarina's sensibilities.
The image of the house is yet another recurring motif in Zarina's art. And with good reason. The only home that the 67-year-old claims to have known was her father's red brick house in Aligarh where she lived with her parents and siblings until her marriage to an Indian diplomat in 1958. Since then until 1976 when she finally decided to settle down in New York, Zarina has trekked across the globe to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and the US, setting up home in over 25 places.
"Life on the road has therefore become the narrative of my visual expression. I have been travelling for over 40 years, In a way, that has shaped my though process and my art," she explains. And what better way to map her peripatetic wanderings and multiple dwellings than to use the image of the mobile house as she did in her installations- House on Wheels and Crawling House- that recall the mass cross-border migration of people following Partition, But this "vagrancy", as Zarina puts it, has its cost in terms of enforcing a perpetual sense of rootlessness. In this vein, all that she can hope- together with Faiz Ahmed Faiz from whose poetry she borrows the title of yet another installation- is that the "flotilla of sorrow will come to rest."
Given Zarina's stature as a signal talent in contemporary art circles, it may be useful to shed some light on her artistic credentials. According to Zarina, her initial exposure to art was through her father Sheikh Abdullah Rashid, a professor of history at Aligarh University, who encouraged her to pursue her intellectual interests and sent her to college for further studies. He would often take Zarina and her siblings to visit Mughal monuments in Agra and Delhi. Hailing from a traditional Muslim household that had few paintings and fewer art objects, Zarina's imagination was fired by Islamic architecture with its emphasis on calligraphy and geometric patterning.
This fascination for simple, linear decoration was further cemented when Zarina entered college to study mathematics, a discipline that explains complex phenomenon though simple forms and equations. Though Zarina continued to practice her art in private, the first break came after marriage. Following her diplomat husband who was posted to Bangkok in 1958, she enrolled herself in a print making class and diligently put in three years to learn the craft. "Though my stay in Bangkok enabled me to gain proficiency in printmaking, I was nowhere close to being an artist," Zarina recalls.
That was to come later. The couple's move to Paris in 1963 afforded Zarina the opportunity to join Ateliar 17 and work under the well-renowned surrealist printmaker Stanley William Hayter. "Those were heady days and I felt I was in Heaven," she reminisces. "Hayter's studio was frequented by artists such as Andre Breton who I could never have imagined meeting." Despite Zarina's enthusiasm, she fumbled in the beginning. "When I showed Hayter my woodcuts, he asked me to put them aside and try drawing with my eyes closed. And there I was, to shy to move my hands." Here is a lesson that Zarina has not forgotten after all these years. "Hayter remains a huge influence in my life. In addition to teaching me the intricacies of the craft of printmaking, he taught me the importance of not forcing the hand to draw what the unconscious does not dictate." 
Were he alive Hayter would have been proud of his nervous apprentice, not only because she is an eminent artist whose work is housed in the collections of prestigious art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but also due to her unflinching faith in his guidance. As an intelligent, evolving artist, Zarina may have changed aesthic tack over time but she still remains an intrepid explorer on the tricky terrain of the mind's eye. It matters little that it defies geological order, turns a corner here before suddenly plummeting downwards. Who says that the act of recall follows a logical, sequential pattern. No set pieces, remember. [[A small black rectangular box]]
Like many other diasporic artists who have left her birthplace, Zarina's work places a premium on recollection and traverses an immense land mass of referencing as if to forestall the loss of home, history and culture. Every square inch of staccato line that she incises on wood or copper plate and then transfers to paper is saturated with her past.
[[A picture of a woman standing with her arms crossed]]
The Herald, August 2004  105 [[On the other page is 104 instead of 105]]

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5/11 - check formatting?