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1/23/07
www.hindustantimes.com
Cultirati

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ANAND SHINDE/HT
HOMECOMING: Zarina Hashmi at the Bodhi Art gallery where she is currently showing her prints, Weaving Memories (1990-2006)

All that's fit to print

New York-based printmaker Zarina Hashmi brings her memories to the city

Gitanjali Dang

I take things out, until the time I can take away nothing anymore. I think this taking away of redundancies is coming parable to Urdu poetry where every word is vital," says Zarina Hashmi of her printmaking practice. 
This process of paring away, her principal tool, has also extended itself to her name. This significant New York-based printmaker uses only her first name professionally. 
Zarina's innumerable travels and her memories of these travels are the kernel of the exhibition, Weaving Memory (1990-2006), which comprises 18 intimately scaled portfolios (a series of prints). The travels undertaken by Zarina could be physical or ideological but more often than not they are a combination both.
Zarina left her home in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, when she was 21 and lived the nomad's life for long, she maintained brief residences in Tokyo, Paris, and Bangkok among others, before settling down in New York, where she has been for the past 32 years. 
Of the portfolios, The House at Aligarh (1990) was accomplished first and for this she journeyed to her past. It is the only series in which Zarina has used colour. She explains, "I don't like using colour because I don't want my prints to look like paintings."
My Father's House, 1898-1994, 

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Dew, Home is a Foreign Place


Home is a Foreign Place (1999), her "most ambitious portfolio", House with Four Walls (1991), her "favourite", Letters From Home (2004) and Weaving Memory (2006) all return to the past without abandoning the present.
In addition to these reminisces of a deeply private life are recollections of public protests. These Cities Blotted in Blotted into Wilderness, (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib, 2003), Atlas of My World (2001) and Countries (2003), appraise fraught global politics. She says, "For sometime now my ill health has prevented me from going out on protest marches. But in the US, I have protested in support of oppressed nations."

Her frail health has not impeded her practice. The key reason for this could be her technique, which she prefers to keep "simple". She speaks disapprovingly of "printmakers who get carried away by the technique."
Indeed Zarina's hermetic works are her profound contribution to Asian minimalist art.

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At Bodhi Art, 28 K. Dubash Marg, Kala Ghoda, till February 10. 11 am-7pm.