Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Untitled
Zarina (1937 – 2020)
Woodcut, 1969
Zarina Hashmi, known simply by the mononym Zarina, was an Indian-American artist who lived and worked all over the world.
Her life was punctuated by a series of displacements, including the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, an event which greatly affected Zarina’s life and how she related to the world around her. After moving around for several years Zarina eventually settled in New York, giving up her Indian passport to become a US citizen, further separating her from her homeland.
Her work expresses feelings of displacement and alienation and her longing for a home that was no longer there. Forms of houses, floor plans, fault lines and boundaries recur over and over again, often with accompanying text written in Zarina’s native tongue of Urdu, such as letters from family members and lines of Urdu poetry.