Zarina

Zarina is known for her astute use of minimalism and the profound sense of contemplation which her artworks invite. Mapping the Dislocations encapsulates her austere mastery of order and space and explores some of the key themes of her career in relation to displacement and belonging. 

‘Zarina grew up responding to a certain organization of space, the open courtyard of the home and the mosque, and recognized that experience when she looked at another shaping of space in another medium. Perhaps aesthetic traditions and experiences are not incommensurable to each other, despite our habit of separating them into distinct geographic and cultural zones. This is a level of interconnectedness and multiplicity that our conceptual models struggle to explain.’ (R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004, p. 175)

Born in 1937, Zarina was a witness to the traumas of Partition. Her family’s upheaval during this time resulted in her lifelong quest to explore and understand issues associated with personal and communal loss, and the meaningful impact of certain places and memories. In the current lot, sites are joined and interconnected by striking straight lines across the stretch of the paper. Stripped down to a bare amalgamation of dots and lines, Zarina calls on a cartographic organization of space, to collapse expansive terrains and condense the idea of distance and betweenness.

Many of Zarina’s most celebrated works explored the concept of ‘home’, and charted the various journeys she made, for instance between New York and Karachi. Mapping the Dislocations is a personal articulation of Zarina’s travels and ‘dislocations’, whilst also holding a timeless and universal message. Relatable to wider themes of political, religious and racial divisions, Mapping the Dislocations holds a sense of optimism; although there are countless dislocations in the world, they, nevertheless, can be mapped.

Zarina’s unique body of work has gained the artist international recognition. She is represented in major art institutions such as the Met, Guggenheim, MoMA and Whitney Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Gallery, London, the Contemporary Art Museum and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. In 2012, Zarina was honored with a landmark retrospective, shown at the Hammer Museum, Guggenheim and Art Institute of Chicago.