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Rosenberg, Karen 
"Reveling in the Multicultural Possibilities of Paper"
The New York Times.
February 1, 2013, pg, C28

LUHRING AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th Street
New York NY 10011
tel 212 206 91000 fax 212 206 9055
www.luhringaugustine.com

Reveling in the Multicultural Possibilities of Paper 
[[image description]] "Ten Thousand Things," small paper collages recreating Zarina's works. [[/image description]]

KAREN ROSENBERG ART REVIEW
"Paper is an organic material, almost like human skin," the artist Zarina Hashmi has said. "You can scratch it, you can mold it. It even ages." In "Zarina: Paper Like Skin," Ms. Hashmi's exhibition at the Guggenheim, it's that and more: paper is sculpture, poetry, currency and, above all, a kind of permanent home for a nomadic spirit. 
Zarina (professionally, she goes by her first name only) is one of those artists who seem, upon the occasion of a midcareer retrospective like this one, to have been hiding in plain sight. Born in the northern Indian city of Aligarh in 1937, she has lived mainly in New York since the mid-1970s - attracted by, among other things like Carl Andre and Richard Serra and the feminism of Lucy Lippard. Although she is associated with both of those movements, her frequent references to Urdu poetry and other artistic and literary traditions of Southeast Asia have made it difficult for curators to fit her into any one box.
On the basis of works like "Homes I Made/A life in Nine Lines," you might consider her a citizen of the world; this series of vaguely Mondrian-like etchings is based on blueprints from the artist's periods of residence in Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and New York. Another work, "Mapping the Dislocations," connects the dots on her itinerary with black strips collaged on white Nepalese paper. 
Her art speaks poignantly, though sometimes opaquely, of relocation and exile. The violent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which displaced Ms. Hashmi's Muslim family, is referred to in her 2001 woodcut "Dividing Line." To represent the border between the countries, she did not simply carve the snaking diagonal out of the wooden printing block; instead she gouged out the surrounding space, making clear that adjusting national boundaries is never as simple as drawing a line on a map. 
The more cryptic "Home Is a Foreign Place" (1999), a portfolio of 36 woodcuts on handmade Japanese paper, might be seen as an attempt to translate Urdu words into black-and-white abstractions. "Dust" (the title also appears on the piece in Urdu script), somewhat mysteriously, is represented by a black rectangle; "Despair," unnervingly, features two clusters of vertical lines that bring to mind fingernails clawing at a wall. 
It helps, here and elsewhere in the show, to know that the Urdu language is becoming extinct in India and that Urdu poetry, as the scholar Aamir R. Mufti writes in the catalog, is "obsessively concerned with experiences of loss and disappointment." 
You might say the same of Ms. Hashmi, especially in the ruminative second half of the exhibition. The more stimulating first half, however, finds her reveling in the material and multicultural possibilities of paper. The works here, from the late 1960s and early '70s, coincide with a period spent on the road as a diplomat's wife. (Ms. Hashmi married in 1958; her husband died in 1977.) 
In Paris she read Sartre and Beauvoir and saw works by