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Citron, Beth "Zarina Hashmi" Artforum Online Feature 2009 LUHRING AUGUSTINE 531 West 24th Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 206 9100 fax 212 206 9055 www.luhringaugustine.com ARTFORM Zarina Hashmi 531 West 24th Street June 20-July 31 In contrast to what its title suggests, Zarina Hashmi's "The Ten Thousand Things" is a spare and elegant selection of the artist's works on paper and sculpture from the late 1970s until today. Working primarily as a printmaker, Hashmi has used a Minimalist sensibility and an elemental, architectural language to engage themes of home, belonging, and personal journey throughout her career. Her seminal woodblock series, "Home Is a Foreign Place," 1999, is composed of thirty-six prints that each poignantly represents a moment or space she has experiences. These are indicated by the Urdu titles printed on each folio (such as THRESHOLD, DEW, and DESPAIR), which relate to Hashmi's deep-rooted engagement with language and poetry, especially in her mother tongue. Under the guise of abstracted lines and letters, Hashmi's recent works, including the prints Travels with Rani I & II, 2008, and the extraordinary Wrapping the Travels, 2009, detail private histories and map her early travels with her sister across the Indian subcontinent. Hashmi was born and raised in Aligarh, India, and - as an urban nomad ahead of the times - studied and lived in cities including Paris and Tokyo before settling in New York in 1976. With the Indian art boom of the past few years, she earned widespread fame and success as an Indian artist (who is a woman and Muslim to boot). Yet with this exhibition and her recent participation in the historical surveys "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and "Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Hashmi is finally getting her due in varied cultures and contexts and is demonstrating how her work resonates on its own to transcend all of them. - Beth Citron [[image]] Zarina Hashmi, Wrapping the Travels, 2009, woven strips of woodcut prints and computer-generated text, 24 x 20"
