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Zarina Hashmi Whitewall daily    7/13/09 1:54 PM

crawl and connect dots that mark cities that were part of the voyage. On the face of it, visually it comes off as impersonal, only to be transformed by the artist's narrative. In a way, this puts into question whether we should still consider the death of the author as being the more predominant focus of most contemporary criticism. In Zarina's works there is no separation between the hand that leads to the materialization of her work, the intent of the artist, and the ultimate meaning the viewer derives.

For instance the use of language, in particular Urdu, comes from an apparent engagement with a heightened awareness of her mortality. Urdu is considered a dying language, making its use quite a profound poetic metaphor for Zarina's search for some kind of liberation or reconciliation. So when you look at a work like (italics) Home is a Foreign Place (1999), this fragment of the story, along with the rest of it, sets up the kind of engagement the artists want you to have. 

These personal accounts do not scream at you as you walk about the white cubed space that has been transformed into something sublime. Instead they are communicated purely through interaction with the dexterity and perfection of each line, stroke, cut and layering of shape, void or gold leaf layer. The fact that there's nothing extraneous, not a line that shouldn't be there, or a cut-out that throws you out of balance, is striking. And yet it's not about stability. It's about the capricious nature of trying to map her place in this world and somehow understand the volatile nature of human existence and relationships. Zarina seems conscious of the restless journey that she has been taking all her life before it brought her to this moment. The use of gold leaf is said to relate to her finding that "light" -finding herself back at the beginning as Ts'en Shen elucidated.

Early works, such as (italics) Homes I made (line) A Life in Nine Lines (1997), consist of floor plans of houses or buildings in cities that Zarina lived in from Delhi to Tokyo, Paris to Los Angeles. Each point has the cities name and year written. The same preoccupation with cities she lived in is seen in (italics) Delhi(2000). The prints look like etched versions of the satellite pictures that Google Maps can conjure up in a second. And this was truly interesting to me. When you look at current shows that have opened post "The Generational" at the New Museum, there is that enquiry into the use of new media and the internet, with works offering a visual intensity that's different from Zarina's, both formally, and conceptually. The artists being shown in a number of these shows are from a different generation. Seeing Zarina's works as they have evolved over the last three decades within the context of younger artists that are in the spotlight right now, is crucial to the manner in which you engage with the older artists work. It puts things into perspective somehow. This is a more mature artist's preoccupation with many of the same issues that the younger generation is dealing with, yet involving a completely different set of aspirations, questions, answers and attitudes. The sense of anxiety, the idealistic notions of the restless traveler, being cosmopolitan or globalized, and the notion of displacement, really mean an entirely different thing in contemporary culture today.

(bold) Zarina Hashmi, (italics) The Ten Thousand Things, Luhring Augustine, 532 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011, June 20-July 31, 2009

Tags:(underlined) Delhi, Home is a Foreign Place, Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, Luhring Augustine, Meenakshi, Thirukode, The Generational, The New Museum, The Ten Thousand Things, Travels with Rani, Ts'en Shen, Urdu, Wrapping the Travels, Zarina Hashmi

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