Font of identity: Zarina Hashmi at the Tate Modern – video interview

by joseph on May 30, 2014 News | Comments Off on Font of identity: Zarina Hashmi at the Tate Modern – video interview

Indian-born, New York-based artist Zarina Hashmi uses family letters written in Urdu to express her identity and connections with her past.

In a short video documentary produced by the Tate Modern in London, the artist talks about her exhibition, “Letters from Home,” which opened on 28 March 2013. Through personal letters, the exhibition illustrates an immigrant’s disconnection from his or her homeland. 

This article was written by a participant in our art writing diploma programme. Do you want to write for Art Radar, too? Click here to find out more about our Diploma in Art Journalism & Writing.

In the Tate video interview, Zarina discusses how working with letters from her sister, Rani, has helped her to preserve her sense of identity. “It’s almost like writing your life’s story, and it’s not just my life’s story. It’s the story of all immigrants. And that’s where the home comes in, the idea of home, and maps and floor plans,” she says. “I just made my personal life the subject of my art, so I have to write about what I have gone through”.

Watch the Tate video interview with Zarina on youtube.com

The video juxtaposes images of New York, where Zarina has lived and worked since 1973, with the Urdu-inscribed prints that illustrate both her physical and emotional journeys. The first artwork in the video is a detail of Atlas of My World (2001), in which a jagged black line separates India from Pakistan. “I really don’t have a family in India,” Zarina notes. She states that the significance of her family’s forced move from India to Pakistan, a result of the 1947 Partition, was not something that she fully comprehended until many years later.

Zarina’s style derives from the blending of cultures that she has experienced in her travels and studies. She completed a degree in Mathematics in 1958, but soon fell in love with printmaking. After training in woodblock printing in Bangkok and Tokyo, Zarina also studied intaglio in Paris.

In Zarina’s workspace, bits of paper, covered in Urdu and cut into geometric strips, await placement in her various artistic projects. The plywood engravings she has used in the printmaking process are seen at her workbench. The softness of the wood is what attracted Zarina to the medium: “I just like the texture of the wood; I like the way you dig in.”

Zarina often uses writing as the subject of her work and is greatly influenced by the rich poetic history of her mother tongue, Urdu. “For me, the image follows the words and they all come from, they all have a reference somewhere, mostly in poetry,” she explains.

Dashmesh Gill, an Indian-born Canadian poet who writes primarily in Urdu, says in an email to Art Radar that visual images such as those presented in Zarina’s work have in turn inspired him as a writer. “My poetry follows images,” he explains. “As a poet, I weave words around them so others can see them too.”

Also in an email to Art Radar, Ajit Maan, American cultural theorist and author of Internarrative Identity: Placing the Self, describes Zarina’s work as “the art of the nomad, crossing the borders of conventional categories of nation, language, medium and treatment of medium to explore and express her experience.”

Zarina’s “Letters from Home” exhibition is on display at the Tate Modern until the end of August 2014. The TateShots documentary is part of an ongoing series, started in 2007, that highlights various exhibitions held at the Tate.

This article was written by a participant in our art writing diploma programme. Do you want to write for Art Radar, too? Click here to find out more about our Diploma in Art Journalism & Writing.

66

  375

Related Topics: Zarina Hashmi, Indian artists, woodcuts, printmaking, art about memory, art about migration, identity art, video interviews with artists

Related Posts:

• Water that sustains and destroys: Rina Banerjee’s installation at Freer Sackler – podcast – November 2013 – Indian-American artist Banerjee explains her practice’s connection with the environment and diaspora
• Nomadic paper artist Zarina Hashmi’s concept of home – Guggenheim talk – March 2013 – Zarina speaks with Professor Andreas Huyssen on her notion of home as a foreign place
• Chinese woodcut artist Yang Hongwei on meditation, materialism and loneliness – interview – February 2013 – Hongwei talks about how his state of mind influences his art
• Innovation in residence: 10 years on top for Singapore Tyler Print Institute – July 2012 – Art Radar takes a look back on STPI’s groundbreaking model for contemporary art making
• Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani artists show seminal works in 3-city exhibition: Lines of Control – February 2009 – two influential art enterprises, Green Cardamom and Middle Eastern gallery The Third Line, co-present the fascinating exhibition series “Lines of Control”

Subscribe to Art Radar for more on contemporary art from the South Asian diaspora