Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020) – artist, printmaker, poet
For her art work, she is known simply as Zarina, choosing not to take on either her father or husband’s last name.
Zarina was born in Aligarh, India and grew up on the grounds of Aligarh Muslim University where her father was a Professor of History. At the age of 5 her father took her on an airplane, and later in her life she joined the Delhi Flying Club to learn to glide – she said flying gave her ‘a sense of absolute freedom’. These experiences clearly reflect in her work – a way of viewing countries, places, homes from a seemingly detached ‘birds-eye view’. Talking about her 1987 cast-paper sculpture ‘Flight Log’, Zarina said:
“Flight Log contains four lines of text. It says, I tried to fly / Got caught in the thermal / Could never go back / Having lost the place to land. In those four lines I wrote my autobiography.”
In 1947 Partition occurred In India, and Zarina’s family were moved to a refugee camp in Delhi for their safety. Her family eventually moved to Lahore, and then Karachi, Pakistan. Zarina returned to Aligarh, and gained a degree in Mathematics in 1958, at a time when very few Indian women were given this opportunity. “I wanted to be an engineer, but I just loved the geometry of it” she said. “I like to draw straight lines”. This love of maths, and the fact that she was a Muslim-born woman who grew up surrounded by the inherent regular geometry of Islamic architecture, are present in her use of pattern, and repetition, and her beloved “straight lines”.
1958 also marked the year she married an Indian foreign service diplomat, Saad Hashmi. This allowed Zarina to travel extensively, meeting new people and always learning new techniques – the various cities and homes she lived in are presented in her series ‘Homes I Made / A Life In Nine Lives’. The first posting was to Bangkok, where she admired a beautiful Japanese woodblock print on the wall at a diplomatic party – she then went on to study woodblock printing.
The pair lived in Paris between 1963 and 1967, and Zarina studied printmaking at Atelier17. During a brief period in Bonn, in 71-72, she learned how to silkscreen. In 1974 Zarina was awarded a Japan Foundation Grant for a visiting artist to embark on a two-week fellowship studying woodblock techniques with Toshi Yoshida – Zarina stayed for a year, apprenticing at the studio, working with a printmaker, and working on her own art on the weekends.
In 1976, Zarina moved to New York, into her studio which she called her Space To Hide Forever. Her husband died in 1977, and Zarina retained this studio as her home base for most of the remainder of her life. She taught at the New York Feminist Art Institute, and joined the Heresies Collective, a group of feminist artists who published regular journals of art and writing. Between 1992 and 1999, she taught printmaking at the University of California, and shuttled between Santa Cruz, New York, and Pakistan where her sister lived.
This further expanded and questioned the idea of what home even means. Her work often deals with ideas of displacement, borders, nostalgia/memories and home. She has described herself as having no real home, other than the past of her childhood.
‘Letters From Home’ is a perfect example of writing and art literally intersecting for Zarina – the home in this case is her beloved sister Rani, who was a constant throughout her life, and the art features letters written in Urdu from Rani relating to various life events, and overlaid with the outlines of houses, or a floor plan, or map.
“We are all storytellers, and paper and ink is my preferred method. It is a medium that has been used for centuries to record our stories. I have always been interested in calligraphy and words, and like the fragility and resilience of paper”
Her artworks are primarily monochromatic, with minimalist motifs and references, and Urdu calligraphy. They now reside in the collections of Tate Modern, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Guggenheim and Whitney. She has been represented by gallerists in New York and Paris; in Delhi and Karachi.
Open the Door 2021
In Conversation with Sabba Khan and Nyla Ahmad
