How does it feel to be uprooted from a place you call “home?” What does it feel like to be a refugee in a foreign land? While some may know, others might witness and experience these unpredictable moments in life.
To be forced to abandon a place that holds on to you even after you are long gone is a brutal reality for migrants. They belong neither here nor there, and their childhood memories, though distant, keep haunting them of a place they considered their very own.
With Zarina Hashmi’s artwork, you can experience the feeling of homelessness conjured up in her thought-provoking printworks as she impresses on our minds the harsh reality of a refugee’s life.
From knowing about the artist, exploring her themes, to reflecting on her minimalist meditations and her major list of works, this blog will help you navigate the stories of her life and artworks.
Who is Zarina Hashmi?
Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-born American artist from Aligarh, made waves internationally with her minimalist creations. Her exploration of multiple media only refined her expertise in paper, print, collage, and sculpture.
As a student of mathematics at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Zarina Hashmi’s artwork reflects a sense of structural purity. Having been born in a Muslim family, the geometric patterns in her art are inspired by her love for Islamic architecture.
She intensified her art practice over the years, travelling across borders and her sojourns took her to Bangkok, Paris, Japan, and Europe. Throughout her travels, she mastered the art of printmaking and even joined the New York Feminist Art Institute.
A fiercely independent woman, the artist’s thematic exploration of migration and struggles during the Partition of India in 1947, won her the prestigious Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Vibhushan Awards.
Themes in Zarina Hashmi’s Minimalist Artworks
As one comes across Zarina Hashmi’s artwork, they can discover themes of home, belonging, identity and memory. Her personal experiences of dislocation and exile from her home country during the Partition of India in 1947 have shaped the poignant themes of her artistic expression.
Zarina stands out as an artist who has worked with abstraction and minimalism throughout her career, and her work continues to inspire people all over the world. Her creations were featured across reputable international museums like the Guggenheim (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Zarina’s Minimalist Mediations on Home and Exile
“I understood from an early age that home is not necessarily a permanent place.”
When people are displaced from their country and survive as refugees in a foreign land, can they call it home? With the Partition of India in 1947, people who belonged to their birthplace were compelled to leave it all behind.
These people were only able to look back in time by revisiting their memories, and with a wistful longing to return to a place they once called “home.” What follows the migration and the abandonment is suffering and death, and having fled her home in Delhi with her family during the Partition, the artist has been exposed to the political scenario of unrest and chaos.
People who have been uprooted from their homes and forced to migrate can relate to the truth in every sense. The artist recounts, “I have had people come to my show and start to cry,” and the reason was “that is our story also.”
Zarina, as an artist, can equally empathize with the universal suffering that exile brings, and her solidarity with the world has expanded the political scope of her work. The brutal force of colonialism, which has often divided people and nations, was also felt in Palestine and Syria.
She was a witness to the loss and despair that migration brings, and the recurring themes in her work, like the “Temporary Homes” or “Without Destination”, only make the profundity of her experiences more evident.
List of Zarina Hashmi’s Works
House with Four Walls: The artist’s childhood days at Aligarh were spent surrounded by her family, and the artist is seen to revisit those days in her autobiographical print, House with Four Walls.
Home is a Foreign Place: A composition of 36 woodblocks, Zarina Hashmi’s prints have a monochromatic design. Home is a Foreign Place, by the creator, is a story of moments across time and space.
It highlights the painful reality that home is never a permanent place. As part of the print, words like ‘axis’, ‘distance’, ‘road’, and ‘wall’ conjure up a visual vocabulary, written in the Nastaliq script of the native Urdu language.
Dividing Line: An iconic work of Zarina Hashmi, Dividing Line is an example of the creator’s long-term commitment to paper, carving and cartography. It’s quite astonishing that something as simple as a line (border) can fragment, uproot and separate homes, families and the self.
Letters from Home: The artist shared a deep bond with her sister Rani, who lived in Pakistan. Zarina Hashmi’s Letters from Home is her sister’s memory preserved in a series of prints overlaid with geometrical shapes and maps of cities. The letters reveal the tragic moments of her sister’s life, like the death of her parents or the moving away of her children, and how intensely she missed Zarina.
Travels with Rani: A diptych print, Travels with Rani is a visual record of the railway stations that artist Zarina has visited in the entire Indian subcontinent with her sister Rani. It’s an abstract map that records the private history of the two sisters’ sojourns.
Temporary Homes: The plight of migrants once they are displaced from their homes due to political crises is deplorable. The life that is spent in tents, a temporary home, is conceptually presented in Zarina Hashmi’s prints. Artist Zarina used folded paper tied to a sheet as a visual representation of the refugee camps in 1947.
Without Destination: Themes of migration are universal, and artist Zarina has not only voiced the stories from her life through her prints but also explored the forced migration of the Rohingyas and Syrian refugees.
As the name suggests, Without Destination is a journey of the people by sea on a boat towards the unknown. The cardiographic heartbeat is superimposed on the image of a boat in Zarina Hashmi’s artwork, representing the people forced to sail to “… a country that is not theirs, and not a friendly place.”
Bottom Line
Art is a powerful medium of expression, and influential artist Zarina merged her personal experiences with creativity, offering an outlet for her emotions and the suffering she witnessed during a crucial moment in Indian history.
The recurring themes in her printworks only reveal how the migration was profoundly influential in a life that survived the loss of home and family. Zarina Hashmi’s artwork is not only historically significant but also a timeless reminder to people that a home can also be a dream destination!