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Lot 89

 

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"I just made my personal life the subject of my Art." - ZARINA HASHMI

The art of Zarina Hashmi - or simply 'Zarina' as she preferred to be known - has always engaged with the politics of home, displacement and migration - informed by a lifetime of travelling and relocating. The Indian-born American artist, according to New York Times critic Holland Cotter, "turned the history of her peripatetic life into an emotional... "I just made my personal life the subject of my Art." - ZARINA HASHMI

The art of Zarina Hashmi - or simply 'Zarina' as she preferred to be known - has always engaged with the politics of home, displacement and migration - informed by a lifetime of travelling and relocating. The Indian-born American artist, according to New York Times critic Holland Cotter, "turned the history of her peripatetic life into an emotional and spiritual guide composed of spare images, poetic words and subtle politics." (Holland Cotter, "Zarina Hashmi, Artist of a World in Search of Home, Dies at 82," The New York Times, 5 May 2020, online)

Zarina's works continue to remain germane - even decades after they were made - to the political circumstances of our time. The following three lots - made at different periods in the artist's life - represent successively expanding physical spaces, beginning with a microcosmic house, to the scenic vistas of a city, and ending with a cartographic perspective of five war-torn countries. Her work is not only a topographical record of her own life, the houses and cities she lived in, but of a much larger landscape of geopolitical conflict and violence. "Zarina's work has moved across regions and established communication by using the common right to the face of the earth." (Homi K Bhabha quoted in Devika Singh, Zarina: Folding House, New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2014, criticalcollective.in, online)

Born on 16 July 1937 in the university town of Aligarh in India, Zarina grew up in what she described as a traditional Muslim home. Her father was a professor of Mughal history at the Aligarh Muslim University, and it was through him that she was first exposed to art. During her childhood, he took her to visit the Mughal monuments and buildings in Agra and New Delhi, and told captivating stories of the former empire. Later, he encouraged her to explore her intellectual interests and send her to college, where she "...was a standout of her generation, excelling in student activities and drawing praise for her many accomplishments. She had the intellectual confidence to take the hard option of mathematics as her course of studies rather than the humanities favoured by most of her contemporaries. (Kusum Haider, "Towards the Light," The Indian Quarterly, online)

This early exposure to Islamic design and architecture, and a background in mathematics, formed the structural foundation of Zarina's geometric style in later years. However, it is the nostalgic memory of her home, of spending hot summers outdoors under the stars with her sister, that shapes the emotional depth of her art. "The floor plan of her childhood house, whose walls enclosed a fragrant garden, became a recurrent presence in her art." (Cotter, online)

Zarina was only 10 when she experienced the tragedy of Partition. Her family was one of the many who stayed behind, but a decade later moved to Karachi, Pakistan. Zarina, however, remained rooted in Aligarh to finish her studies, and in 1958, she married a fellow student, Saad Hashmi, who had joined the Indian Foreign Service. Their first posting was in Bangkok, where they moved and her interest in printmaking began. Even so, the events of Partition, her family's displacement and her own migration, would deeply come to affect her work. Lot 88 is a precursor to a series calling Folding House that the artist made in 2014, similarly depicting a house split neatly down the middle - undoubtedly, alluding to Partition.

A life of diplomatic missions took Zarina and her husband to various locations. "The criss-crossing of cities and the experience of being in different places and homes, with different people, is reflected in her creative expression." (Haider, online) After a brief period in New Delhi, they moved to Paris in 1963, where Zarina attended British printmaker William Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17 workshop - studying and absorbing the various trends in European modernism and abstraction along the way. A decade later, she moved to Japan on her own, and studied woodblock techniques at Toshi Yoshido's studio in Tokyo on a Japan Foundation Fellowship. During this period, she began experimenting with printmaking techniques. "She eliminated color. She printed grains and textures she found on scraps of wood. She punctured and slashed the surface of handmade paper, or built it up sculpturally with pulp." (Cotter, online)

After her husband's death in 1977, Zarina moved to New York City-a difficult life at first. "I had very little money, was depressed and never wanted to leave my house... I felt eaten away." (Artist quoted in Cotter, online) Over time, however, Zarina became involved in the Manhattan art world, particularly with the feminist art movement. It was also around this time in the early 1980s that the themes of home and exile became central to her art.

Zarina moved to California in 1992, and began teaching printmaking at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she would live for another five years. Lot 89 was made during this time. The set of four etchings, titled Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Night Sea and Dark Sea - with text in Urdu, likely from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz - represent abstracted memories of her time in the West Coast city. Here, she "uses the rigid formality of light and dark blocks to conjure up the mysterious space of creativity out of which poetry appears," while simultaneously evoking the Pacific Ocean vistas at night. (Glenn D Lowry, "Remembering Zarina (19372020)," moma.org, 30 April 2020, online)

These works were the precursor to a seminal portfolio of 36 woodcut prints that Zarina made in 1999, titled Home is a Foreign Place. "Made during a particularly fraught period when the artist faced eviction from her Manhattan loft, the folios in this series are visual responses to words in her native Urdu that conjure multiple senses of home-from the areas of a physical space to the experience of weather in a particular place to the cosmic phenomena that mark the passage of time." (metmuseum.org, online)

In 2003, Zarina produced a series of woodcuts under the theme of Cities, Countries, and Borders, "motivated by a newspaper photograph of Grozny, the devastated capital of the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, and shaken by growing Islamophobia in the West." (Margo Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008, online) Lot 90, titled Countries, is part of this series, and consists of literal and symbolic maps of places with incidents of antiIslamic violence, with their names in Urdu text inscribed on each place. The set of five woodcut prints depict Chechnya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq and Afghanistan. The fifth of these is "Holy Land" - an abstracted representation of the walled Old City of Jerusalem where the Al-Aqsa Mosque lies. "Rather than taking refuge in silence, through these disquieting works the artist evidences her deep unease over attacks against Muslim communities during the course of her lifetime, as well as in the distant past...Countries alludes to the contemporary plight of her coreligionists in Asian and European nations (and territories aspiring to nationhood) ravaged by conflicts whose ultimate resolution still remains largely unknown." (Machida, online)

Zarina's choice of medium is equally important as the issues she chooses to represent. Her use of woodcut - a medium used primarily as protest art in the works of Mexican political artists and 20th century German Expressionists - combined with the inclusion of the Urdu script, and calligraphic and geometric elements reminiscent of Islamic art and architectural forms, evoke a stark and meaningful aesthetic.

Likewise, the use of gold leaf, as seen in lot 88, stands for the presence of 'Noor,' or the divine light, a concept present in many religious traditions. "The presence of gold is a way of deploying a common visual language that crosses cultural divides and of encouraging a shared aesthetic experience... The artist uses gold to deploy a vocabulary of mass, volume and light articulated on paper." (Singh, criticalcollective.in, online) Similarly, "For Zarina... ink is not just ink, and paper is not just any old paper. Mounted against the muted, grainy background of Arches Cover or Somerset stock, which is wispy around the edges, each type of image calls for its own variety of handmade paper - from Japanese Kozo to Indian and Nepalese. The artist subjects them all to staining, folding, threading, and puncturing in turn... The other materials Zarina works with, like... 22-carat gold leaf (favored in India and across South Asia), create even greater relief and sharper, more pronounced edges and lines. Even in Zarina's more overtly two-dimensional works, there is a tension between the fragility and lightness of the materials deployed and the impression of solidity and weight they convey." (Agnieszka Gratza, "Zarina's Folding House," Art Agenda Reviews, 3 March 2014, online)

In recent years, there has been increasingly great interest in Zarina's work. She was one of the four artists who represented India at the Venice Biennale in 2011. This was followed by a retrospective show of her works titled Zarina: Paper like Skin at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2012, which travelled to the Guggenheim in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Zarina passed away on 25 April 2020, leaving a legacy of "...a life left behind and a life well lived. Her work could be stunningly beautiful and haptic as easily as it could be cerebral and abstract - but it was always meaningful and carefully considered, as she was herself." (Lowry, online)

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