Displacement, Disturbance and Diaspora in Zarina Hashmi’s Art
Indian-born, American artist Zarina Hashmi considers home: a relationship that she, in her often-displaced, often-moved lifestyle, had to learn repeatedly, but seems never to have mastered. Living, what she called a “perpetual exile”, Zarina said that though. She had no home, the thought of home carried her as she carried it, bringing comfort and confrontation in equal measures, the complexity of emotion that she contemplated through multiple series of her signature minimalist paintings.
“Home is a Foreign Place” is the title of one of Zarina’s installations. The title, along with the work, depicts clearly her conflict. Zarina is known for her exploration of the diaspora and discomfort of being foreign; her paintings often go back to old houses she has inhabited and emblems of her tumultuous past. As a Pakistani refugee during the Partition, Zarina had experienced displacement as a child– as an adult, she continued to move, from country to country and city to city (in part due to her husband’s profession as a diplomat, and then later by her own volition), all the while documenting the “homes” she inhabited, the homes she invented.
Zarina uses lines, prints, blocks, hatches, but most prominently, what Zarina creates her images through is space. Black space, emptied, symbolic of her experience of home. Some of her prints resemble scarce maps (particularly, in her series “Cities I Called Home”), others resemble shattered windows, tiles, pillars. She uses woodblock, paper, lithography, silkscreen, sculptures, and words to recreate her memories, all of which come down to a single interrogation: that of place, what it means to her, and what it means at all in a sense of relating to it.
Where do we come from? How does the world we create? What is home, and what is not home, and what does it mean to be eluded by it? Can the home be found or can it only be imagined? What role does memory play in displacement, in re-placement? What can art do to capture stillness and distress? Zarina asks questions, and answers them, through her work, refreshed through new perspectives as she moves across the world. Her recollections of childhood remain with her, as do the particularities of her houses and neighborhoods that she leaves behind. Zarina, at the end of her investigations, turns to us, as if to have us consider: if what we leave is home, then what does it mean to stay?
Zarina, over time, became a feministic icon, an important representative of the Indo-American diaspora. Her work is both deeply personal and political, and individual reflection of collective experience. And while central to her work is the disturbance and pain of displacement, it is also integral for the viewer to witness the stillness, the silence, the sanctity of her work, the sense of “coming home”, even if through metaphor alone.
Text by Kiara puri
Image Courtesy: Jeanna Bucher Jaeger, Kiran Nadar, Museum of art and Museum of modern art.
Find out more about the artist and Gallery:
https://www.galleryespace.com/artists/gallery-espace/zarina-hashmi/
