Born in Aligarh in 1937, Zarina Hashmi received a B.Sc. degree with honours from the city’s Muslim University in 1958 before she turned to the study of printmaking in India and then abroad. Between 1963 and 67 she studied printmaking with S. W. Hayter and Krishna Reddy at Atelier 17 in Paris, and in 1974 studied woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshido’s studio in Tokyo on a Japan Foundation Fellowship.

Hashmi has always engaged with the politics of space and its crossings. Mirroring her own extensive travels and the multiple meanings that the word ‘home’ has for her, Hasmi’s work challenges familiar locations like ‘country’, the ways in which they are bordered, delimited and traversed, and the feelings and memories that they evoke in us. Her minimalist prints use these locations to construct new geographies, imbuing them with fresh perspectives and new, universal meanings.

Hashmi has been awarded residencies at Art-Omi in Omi and at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, both in New York, where she eventually settled. In 1985 and in 1990 Hashmi was awarded the New York Fine Art Fellowship in the printmaking category. In addition Hashmi has taught at Bennington College, Cornell University and the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Her solo shows include two retrospectives, Silent Soliloquy at Bodhi Art, Singapore (2006) and Counting 1977-2005, at Bose Pacia Modern, New York (2005); and other like Cities, Countries and Borders at Chemould Gallery in Mumbai and Chawkandi Gallery in Karachi, (2004); Maps, Homes, and Itineraries at Gallery Lux in San Francisco (2003); Home is a Foreign Place at Korn Gallery, Drew University, Madison (2002); Homes I Made at the Faculty Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz (1994); and House with Four Walls at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (1992). In addition, her work has been featured in several group shows and is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

The artist lives and works in New York.

WORK

Shadow House
by Zarina
Cut Nepalese paper
2006

Echo
by Zarina
Digitally printed text on Kozo paper collaged on Arches Cover Buff paper
2013

Blinding Light
by Zarina
Okawara paper gilded with 22-carat gold leaf
2010

ESSAYS

Zarina: A Tribute

by Various

Friends and colleagues of the late artist remember her life and work.

I feel very privileged to have known and worked, as a curator and writer, with Zarina. In 2012-13, her remarkable retrospective ‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin’ showed at the Hammer Museum, Guggenheim and Art Institute of Chicago

Oneiric homes: Zarina at KNMA

by Gayatri Sinha

aate hain ghaib se yeh mazamin khayal mein

ghalib sari-e-khamah nava-e-sarosh hai

[“These ideas visit the imagination from beyond: in the scratching of the reed pen (I hear) the angel’s song.”]

It is serendipitous and deeply poignant that a fulsome expansive exhibition of

The Art of Dispossession

by Nadia Nooreyezdan

In the summer of 2015, while working in New Delhi, I ventured into the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art to see Constructs|Constructions, a collection of works by 30 artists. I found myself circling back, repeatedly, to Zarina’s ‘Home is a Foreign Place’ (1999). The work consists of 36 woodblock prints,

Silent Soliloquy

by Uma Nair

When an artist makes a statement through a form that lends itself to an expression of the personal and the perceptive, the works seem to embody the transience beheld within the very exercise of capturing that sense of assonance in the modulations of harmony.

Zarina’s cachet of works from the 70’s,

Zarina's Folding House

by Devika Singh

Essay first published as the introduction to Zarina: Folding House, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, 2014.

Drawings of houses have long acted as portable repositories of Zarina’s migrant biography. The variations she developed throughout her career on their shapes, sizes and floor plans

Zarina Hashmi: Sacred Geometry of Light and Darkness

by S Kalidas

Kya bood-o-baash poochho ho poorab ke saakino; hamko ghareeb jaan ke hans hans pukaar ke

Dilli jo ek shahar tha aalam mein intakhaab; rahte the muntakhib hi jahan rozgaar ke

Usko falak ne loot ke veeran kar diya; ham rahnewale hein usi ujare dayar ke

Why ask where

Zarina