Artist in Residence

Shapeshifting homes, houses on wheels and diagrammatic dwellings: Zarina’s solo at the KNMA underscores a preoccupation with the shifting idea of identity, suggests Meera Menezes.

- Meera Menezes

A recurring image in Zarina: A Life in Nine Lines | Across Decades – Borders – Geographies, which runs from the 30th of January to the 3rd of June at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, is that of a house on wheels. Striking in its simplicity, in many ways, it perfectly embodies the life of the itinerant artist. In fact, a row of such homes pops up in a work titled House on Wheels right at the entrance of the gallery, setting the tone for the show, sensitively curated by Roobina Karode.

Fashioned from a combination of elementary geometric forms – a triangle, a square, a circle–the motif takes on different avatars through the exhibition. There is the bronze I went on a journey perched on a shelf, the set of ten homes in Home I made, a multiple of five houses in Moving House II and the wall-mounted Ghar with wheel fashioned from cast paper with terra rosa pigment.