The Brooklyn Rail

There is a lexicon of “home” that plays out across scale. At its broadest, this might include the vocabulary of one’s nation, its iconography, its rituals, smells, tastes, and sounds. Then there are the patterns specific to our individual dwellings—the song of footsteps that tells us which family member is walking down the stairs, an old stain on a rug that heralds a thick narrative, or a sudden, blanketing silence that may dictate whether it’s safe to leave our bedroom. Zarina, the Indian-born, New York-based artist who died in 2020 at eighty-two, spent a lifetime developing her own vernacular through several bodies of relatively quiet, rhythmic work that manage to ask what it is we may be longing for when we’re longing for home. At first blush, the visual language she established might appear to be one chiefly concerned with materiality and restrained form, but it rewards further attention by expanding outward into the artist’s personal dialect of belonging. Serial works that can read as explorations of composition, geometry, and material processes—her early training in mathematics and her consideration of a career in architecture may offer some clue to these predilections—do reward on those formal planes, and handsomely so, but they also prove to be moving inquiries into how our senses of self are formed, fractured, and continuous over time.

As evidenced by the work included in Luhring Augustine’s posthumous mini-retrospective Beyond the Stars, home, for Zarina, was often an itinerant’s home, one of dislocation, fracture, and all the longing that distance holds. Born in Aligarh, India, Zarina was ten years old at the time of the 1947 Partition. Her family briefly moved to the new country of Pakistan before returning to Aligarh after the political upheaval had subsided. At twenty-one years old, she married a diplomat and the two lived together in Thailand, France, Germany, and New Delhi before moving to New York in 1976. Her husband died unexpectedly the following year, at which point the artist decided to stay in New York (short stints in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles notwithstanding), where she remained until shortly before her death. Two woodcuts in the show, Dividing Line (2001) and Abyss (2013), explicitly render the border demarcated by the British between India and Pakistan during the Partition. In the earlier work, Zarina carved out the negative space around a jagged line that represents the border, creating the image of a long border line floating on the page amidst the printing block’s remnant hash marks. In the latter piece, she returned a dozen years later to create an inverse composition, carving the border’s form from the block so it’s rendered as a white mark cut into solid black.

Across her practice, much of Zarina’s work carried this mantle of the artist’s personal mythology as filtered through her material and process interests. Two 2013 pieces titled Echo, for example, include snippets of letters her older sister Rani wrote to the artist but never mailed, instead hand-delivering them several years after they were written. These letters, written in their native Urdu, largely contained news of losses that Rani suffered throughout the years. For these pieces, Zarina collaged moments from the letters into perfect squares centered on the paper, erecting four little walls to dwell in on the land of the page.

The artist’s sister is present again, though more subtly, in two 2014 woodcuts, Fold in the Sky and the show’s titular work, Beyond the Stars. Both depict celestial scenes that Zarina made by carving small dots in varying densities across her printing matrix, from which an image of the night sky clearly develops. In these two pieces made shortly after Rani’s death, a dialogue emerges between the inevitability of personal tragedy and the dizzying vastness of the cosmos, with its absurd way of contextualizing our own scale and reminding us of the passage of time. In the latter work, an Urdu line from the poet Allama Iqbal is pasted below the image, and a handful of perfect golden circles (made by hole punching gilded paper) are scattered across and outside of the woodblock’s picture plane, representing for the artist the concept of noor, or divine light.

Seen together, Zarina’s work makes a moving case for the ways in which we filter a messy world—with its ubiquitous and formidable beauty, with its insistence on breaking our hearts again and again—through the lenses of our interests and idiosyncrasies. For Zarina, it was her engagement with form, process, and material (her deep interest in paper alone is worthy of several essays longer than this one) that allowed her to make manifest the ontological questions we all wrestle with. The act of making, her lifelong investigations into form and material, afforded the artist a space to make sense of an untidy identity situated in a series of untidy environs—not to proffer neat answers to the questions of who one is and why, but to love and perfect the asking.