images | text

Zarina Hashmi
Born in 1937 in Aligarh, India / Lives in New  York, USA

Jens Hoffmann (JH): Many of your works deal with migration, cultural identity, geography, and language. Where does your interest in these topics emerge from?

Zarina Hashmi (ZH): Migration was not a choice I made; it was forced upon me, a consequence of history. I have always seen my identity as part tradition and part language.Geography and studying maps are the preoccupations of a traveler. I’ve always wanted to know where I am and how far I have traveled on the road I traced for myself.

JH: I like the direct connection between you working with maps, creating your own personal maps of the places you have lived, and wanting to know where you are. Where are you now? Is the place you are at right now a place on a map, or do you think of it more in terms of where you are intellectually or even spiritually? Where have all these travels, forced and voluntary, brought you?

ZH: The place where I am right now is not a geographical location on a map. The maps I draw are not going to help any weary traveler find his or her way home. However, inscribing the maps with names that were once in use is an attempt to restore the cultural identity of places and situate them in a historical timeframe. Years of traveling have given me the freedom to negotiate my own personal relationships with different cultures I have encountered. I do not look at the values of the world from the vantage point of the traditional society I grew up in. I have become part of the community of outsiders who left home never to return. Being an exile has become an identity.

JH: When did you start making woodcuts, and how do you see this technique of printmaking as related to the subjects you are exploring?

ZH: I made my first woodcut in 1961 when I was living in Bangkok. Over the years I continued to work in that medium, but it was not until the 1990s that woodcuts became central to the series of portfolios I was working on. The images I work with are not created by spontaneous gestures; the lines are carefully and deliberately carved with a sharp knife. The only textural variations are embedded in the wood.

JH: Can you speak a little bit about the works Blinding Light (2010) and Tasbih III (Prayer Beads III,2008)?

ZH: I don’t make images or objects that I don’t have a personal relationship with. I use tasbih (prayer beads); they are a practice of remembrance by repeating the names and attributes of God. The concept of blinding light, or divine light, plays an important role in many spiritual beliefs around the world. I am referring to the story of Moses asking God to reveal Himself and being blinded by the intensity of the light when his request was granted. Sufi mystics also believe that they were blessed by divine light and long to be united with it.