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travel, but then this autobiographic dimension is not articulated in self indulgent or even nostalgic figurative ways, it is rather worked through formally, relying on carefully crafted, largely abstract, non-figurative vocabulary that interweaves ... spatial geometries with calligraphic writing.... Image and writing, picture and script, create a subtle tension in her works. As the conversation opened, Huyssen asked Zarina to speak about her early years before becoming an artist. Zarina recalled growing up during the period leading up to the Partition of India in 1947, and how she was surrounded in her childhood by Indo-Islamic architectural ruins which she said were near her home in the city of Aligarh, fifty miles south of New Delhi, where she was born in 1937.

She spoke about how this inspired her to want to become an architect. According to ARTINFO, Zarina went on to receive a degree in mathematics, with the hopes of becoming an engineer. During the discussion, she emphasised that even while studying mathematics, she had to draw shapes in order to understand the concepts.

Zarina has lived in numerous cities across the world including Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. In 1975, she moved to New York where she lives today. She left India for the first time in 1958 and, as she pointed out in the Guggenheim talk, it was during her travels between. 1958 and 1961 that she drew practical, directional maps to get from one place to another, a concept that later became central to her art practice.

An established printmaker, Zarina also spoke about her exploration of woodblock printing in Bangkok in 1961 and of her apprenticeship under master Parisian printmaker Stanley William Hayter in the sixties. Zarina had been interested in working with Hayter since she had first read about him in printmaking books, and when her diplomat husband moved to Paris for work, she finally got the chance, studying at Hayter's workshop Atelier-17 for three years.