Mimicking the surface of a wall, frayed and distressed, the work titled Debris of Destruction invoked a sense of loss and pain. Another one &ndash; black in its entirety &ndash; featured five arched forms made out of crushed Indian handmade paper and Sumi ink. Titled The Dark House, it brought with it an ominous cloud promising nothingness. A third one, created again on Indian handmade paper with Sumi ink, portrayed the struggle between light and shadow &ndash; a dance eternally in motion; with one constantly trying to defeat the other. The title of this work was Weaving Darkness and Silence. This also happened to be the title of the entire exhibition that featured the recent works created by celebrated New York&ndash;based artist Zarina Hashmi. Born in 1937 in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, Zarina, as she goes by professionally, is well known for creating works that chronicle her life with recurring themes of home, displacement, borders, journey and memory.<img src="http://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/3785/274685/5acd210967fd5/1523392742888.jpg"" owidth=264 oheight=266" style="height:605px; width:600px" />For this show, Zarina chose to place her favourite medium &ndash; paper &ndash; within the core of her epic explorations into the past. &lsquo;My love for books drew me to paper,&rsquo; explained Zarina. &lsquo;I loved the resilience, the fragility of the pages that held such unforgettable texts, and the portability. So paper was a natural choice for me. I have always loved organic materials that are born from the earth and go back to the earth.&rsquo; Her preoccupation with architecture also found a prominent place within the exhibition where, through minimal lines, she managed to define a collective consciousness. &lsquo;Her large corpus of wood-block prints, wall installations and paper cast pieces all connect the places she had visited or lived in. Ground plans of houses she had lived in and left over the years, maps of the countries she had passed through, letters written to her by a sister deeply affected by the absence of her kin are the visual sources that plot the narrative fabric of Zarina&rsquo;s experience and engender an exploration of themes that resonate universally as well,&rsquo; writes independent curator, writer and architect Sadia Shirazi within the exhibition essay, capturing the dynamic nature of Zarina&rsquo;s works.<img src="http://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/3785/274685/5acd210967fd5/1523392742928.jpg"" owidth=376 oheight=385" style="height:614px; width:600px" />The daughter of a professor at Aligarh Muslim University, Zarina was 10 when India declared its independence, only to be consumed by the communal violence that followed the Partition. Her family eventually moved to Pakistan. That catastrophic event and the move from Aligarh are recurrent themes in her work. Within the entire gamut of works displayed &ndash; where pen and ink and paper and woodcuts &lsquo;weaved&rsquo; a minimal yet rich landscape of compositions &ndash; lay a silent association that was inextricably linked around the concepts of displacement and exile: themes that have distinctly marked her life and continue to do so in the lives of countless others.

Zarina: Weaving Darkness and Silence

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