‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin’

A prominent female artist of her generation, Zarina Hashmi is known for a vivacious visual vocabulary - minimal albeit rich in associations with her own life apart from the thought-provoking themes of exile and displacement, revolves around the concept of home – be it personal, geographic, familial, national or spiritual. It resonates all through her oeuvre.

A retrospective of the renowned printmaker-sculptor at The New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, entitled ‘Paper Like Skin’, is like a live journal of her personal life and events, her work deals with a multitude of themes like displacement, travel, memory and the home, which all echo through her perpetual experience and larger identity of a Diaspora, bringing to the fore the idea of dislocation.

Her deep-rooted attachment to Sufism as well as Buddhism is often reflected in her profuse usage of gold leaf in her works. Conversely, creations like ‘Shadow House’ (2006), cut out of paper from Nepal, are reminiscent of rich Islamic architecture’s sculpted stone friezes and screens (Jali) that let women just peep outside sans they themselves being visible; an interplay of light & shade effectively evoking a house’s ephemeral nature.

Born in New Delhi in 1937, she spent her formative years in Aligarh. After getting married to a diplomat, she often relocated to different countries and continents, profoundly impacting her creative and sensitive mind. This reflected in a sophisticated web of maps and diagrams, embodying the memory of a place, an event, an atmosphere, or the fleeting experience of a sound, a smell, or an emotion.

Paper is of core essence and central to her art practice, both as a flexible material with its own history and properties as well as a handy surface to print on. Works in the show incorporate woodcuts and three-dimensional casts done in paper pulp. Like a live journal of her personal life and events, Zarina Hashmi’s work deals with a multitude of themes like displacement, travel, memory and the home, which all echo through her perpetual experience and larger identity of a Diaspora, bringing to the fore the idea of dislocation.