Zarina Hashmi’s Paper Like Skin: A Search For Roots

Zarina Hashmi’s prints question the notion of home whilst evoking themes of loss and nostalgia. Her own experience of being born in India before being forced to relocate to Pakistan, clearly inform her art, as does her experience of moving to America. The Guggenheim in New York honoured her work with a retrospective entitled Zarina: Paper Like Skin in 2013. Bansie Vasvani visited this retrospective and records her experiences of it.
© Kiss, 1968 Relief print from collaged wood, printed in black and burnt umber on BFK white paper, 76.2 x 51.8 cm, edition 3/10 I Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.
Zarina Hashmi’s long overdue retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, at the Guggenheim, New York, opened to an audience struck by the work’s serenity, quiet dignity and artistic impact. Combining her evocation of language and place to chart her personal itinerant trajectory, Hashmi’s work explores the notion of home and identity with enormous depth and perspicuity. An established printmaker, she is often considered the precursor to a generation of artists for whom transience and impact permeated their work.
In the front room, a portfolio of nine etchings entitled Home I made/A life in Nine Lives, (1997) lines the walls in geometric resplendence. Made on Arches Cover handmade Nepalese paper, this series of simple, two-dimensional grids captures the structure of a basic dwelling anywhere. Zarina’s bare bones depiction can be best described by art critic John Berger’s definition of home as the centre of the universe in an ontological rather than a geographical sense. Letters written by her sister Rani which often described the passing of family members in Pakistan became grist for her etchings and woodcuts. Her reductive images distil the sentiments of home to architectural forms and capture her nostalgia without being maudlin or dramatic. For Zarina, home becomes the place from which the world can be discovered. It is the heart of the real. In these etchings, the original Urdu script of the letters is cut in metal for the prints, and the remainder of each image is rendered in woodcut.
Zarina’s work underscores the sculptural aspect of her printmaking process, acquired from the renowned British printmaker Stanley William Hayter while living in Paris in the 1960s. The painstakingly delicate renditions of Home I made/A life in Nine Lives are steeped in a worldview inspired by the Minimalist tradition. Untitled (1970), Cage (1970), and Kiss (1968) are a series of relief print collages made by inking assembled pieces of wood. Each work is constructed on handmade paper distributed by an organisation founded by Mahatma Gandhi to promote Indian handicrafts. The varying tones of the papers obtained from different regional workshops impart a particular character to each print emphasising the quality of the material as much as the concept behind her creation. Using bits of wood assembled together, she ingeniously creates a corral, a home and a shelter suggestive of protective surroundings.