Zarina Hashmi’s solo show

Zarina Hashmi’s solo is on at Gallery Espace, New Delhi. ‘Maps’ in the exhibit along with the series, entitled ‘Cities I called Home’ are evident of her keenness to depict the realities and challenges of her ‘nomadic’ existence. A sense of poignancy coupled with meditative longing is visible in other works like ‘Coin’, ‘Wall III’, ‘Blinding Light’ and Noor featured in the show.

Zarina Hasmi begins a work not with a visual or an image but a word. Much of poetry, politics and art is essentially centered on the valorization of the place known as ‘home' - the metaphor of ‘shelter'. She has once stated: “Home is the centre of my universe; I make a home wherever I am based. It’s my hiding place - a house with four walls - sometimes four wheels.”[

Born in 1937, Aligarh, she did her B.Sc. (Honors) from Aligarh Muslim University, and then studied printmaking at the Atelier, Paris between with S. W. Hayter (1963- 67) and also wood block printing at Tokyo’s Toshi Yoshido Studio (1974). She has had several solos, such as ‘Paper Houses’, Gallery Espace, (2007); The retrospective, Counting 1977-2005, Bose Pacia, New York (2005), ‘Cities, Countries and Borders’, Chemould, Mumbai; ‘Maps, Homes, and Itineraries’, Gallery Lux, San Francisco (2003), ‘Home is a Foreign Place’, Korn Gallery Drew University, New Jersey (2002).

The artist has received residencies at the Women’s Studio Workshop and Art-Omi in Omi, New York. She was given the N. Y. F. A. Fellowship (Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books). Her work is represented in several prestigious collections, such as Victoria Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Is her art political? Well, it could well be in a sense that a work of art is supposed to provoke a spirit of curiosity and inquiry into the state of the present. When she casts a look around her, the artist finds there are enough things to question ‘the notion of safety, security as well as refuge, but she vociferously proclaims no manifesto. She rather raises oblique queries sans any final pronouncements.