Important Notice

"I have always been a spiritual person, and facing the darkness, facing my mortality does not scare me. It is only when we face the dark night of the soil that we can go home into the blinding light." - ZARINA HASHMI

Zarina Hashmi, popularly known as Zarina, uses her art to engage with the politics of home, space, displacement, and migration, and to deal with "the silence that surrounds both personal and collective traumas of the... "I have always been a spiritual person, and facing the darkness, facing my mortality does not scare me. It is only when we face the dark night of the soil that we can go home into the blinding light." - ZARINA HASHMI

Zarina Hashmi, popularly known as Zarina, uses her art to engage with the politics of home, space, displacement, and migration, and to deal with "the silence that surrounds both personal and collective traumas of the past, particularly in relation to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan." (Anushka Rajendran, "Weaving Darkness and Silence: Zarina Hashmi", Art Asia Pacific, February 2018, online)

Born in Aligarh in pre-Independence India, Zarina received an early introduction to Islamic design and architecture, thanks to her father, and an educational background in mathematics - both of which combined to form the foundation of her geometric style and her emphasis on structural purity. Though her work leans towards minimalism, its starkness is balanced by texture and materiality

The present lot is an expression of Zarina's minimalist style and her relationship with paper. "Her intimate treatment of the material takes on visceral qualities, bringing to mind the physicality of her aging body, and the melding of body and emotional suffering." (Rajendran, online) Created using found paper in 2017, Silent Night is an evocative work that highlights the all-pervading lonely nature of the night through the eleven parallel and vertical lines set against a blank background. It highlights a sense of darkness and silence, with the silence acting as an indicator of "a limit - of language and also of representation." (Sadia Shirazi, "A Room of One's Own: Zarina," Zarina: Weaving Darkness and Silence, February 2018, online)

This immersive engagement with darkness and silence, as observed in the present lot, is perhaps Zarina's way of ultimately achieving relief and catharsis.

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