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"54th Venice Biennale: Zarina Hashmi (India)"   
ART iT,June 2011 

LUHRING
AUGUSTINE

531 West 24th Street
New York NY 10011
tel 212 206 9100 fa 212 206 9055
www.luhringaugustine.com

ART iT: Have you ever considered works such as Home is a Foreign Place, Dividing Line, or Letters from Home to be conscientious reflections on the ideas - ideologies, even - of nations and borders?

ZH: My work was never a conscious reflection on any ideology - it was just a reflection, or narrative, of my own life and the life of many others like me, for whom home has become a foreign place. This is a predicament of the modern age: crossing borders to live in foreign lands and communicating through scraps of papers with quickly jotted notes.

ART iT: You often return to the themes of maps and homes (or in the case of the latter, their architectural plans). These are both schematic, but at a human scale maps are necessarily abstract, while even as abstracted diagrams homes can be intensely personal. Can you explain what draws you to these two themes, and two modes of depiction?

ZH: Maps and the memory of homes hold an inextricable significance in the life of a traveler. With a map, I can revisit the city I knew by tracing the streets and rivers. Home is always an interior reality, which, with a floor plan, I can walk through again and again in my imagination.

ART iT: The word "pavilion" itself suggests a temporary or moveable structure - the French root means "tent." Do you feel at home in a place or at an event like Venice, or is the idea of bringing bits and pieces of the world to one spot anathema to the way you have lived so far? What is your relationship to locality?

You are asking the wrong person this question. I haven't felt a home in any place for over 50 years. I find the idea of a tent very attractive, especially its aspect of temporariness. Art is about commerce, you bring what you make to the marketplace. I don't think locality plays any big role in it, although tourism certainly does.

The 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMinations," opens to the public June 4 and continues through November 27.