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Patel, Vibhuti
"Dividing Lines and the Art of the Exile"
The Wall Street Journal
January 25 2013, pg. A21

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

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Zarina Hashmi, above in her Chelsea studio, is the subject of a career retrospective at the Guggenheim. Clockwise from right, 'Kiss' (1968); Ms. Hashmi with 'Floating House' (2011); and 'Dividing Line' (2001).

(t-b) Ramsay be Give for The Wall Street Journal; Zarina Hashmi/Luhring Augustine, New York

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Said Ms. Pesenti, an expert in prints and drawings, "Zarina's work in paper has a sculptural quality - it's light by evokes the feel of brick. She uses paper in malleable, flexible, diverse ways."

In 1974, Saad joined the Indian Mission to the United Nations in New York, and Zarina followed her in 1975. But as she entered Manhattan's burgeoning feminist art world, her world changed radically: Saad died suddenly in 1977. "When Saad passed away, I decided to settle in New York," she said. "I took a risk to make a life here with no money. Insecurity was next part of my vocabulary."

Moving into a spartan loft in Chelsea, Zarina cast three-dimensional works in paper pulp and in bronze. "Nobody was looking at the visual traditions of India then," she said. "the West considered it ritual, folk art, craft, not a high traditional art."

Following 16th-century Indian tradition, she made her own paper; later, she used textured, handmade papers from India, Japan and Nepal. "I looked at paper and just loved it," she said. "It's an organic material, almost like human skin. You can scratch it, mold it - it even ages."

Though detached from India, she evoked her history by pairing images with words from Urdu poetry - her dying mother tongue - using Islamic calligraphy and embedding monosyllabic words in stunning back-and-white prints that harked back to a haunting past: her home ("Home is a Foreign Place"), her peregrinations ("Homes I Made"), her family ("Letters From Home"), and the enduring wound of Pakistan ("Dividing Line"). Maps became a theme, as did floor plans of homes she's made worldwide. Spare abstractions were her stylistic imprimatur and yet the subjects, the elegiac sensibility, were deeply rooted in an India that is long gone and much missed.

"Indie is still my reality," she said. But "if I had remained there, my vocabulary would have been different."

It would not, that is, have been the vocabulary of migration and memory. "I just wanted a quiet corner where I could pursue my work," Zarina said. "My story is one of all those people who leave their homeland. People respond to [this exhibit]; many sit there and weep. I was able to tell their story, the story of all exiles."