Letters from Home

[Zarina's] practice appears calm, quiet, collected, and free of the desire for spectacular effects and monumentality. She seems intent on inviting emotional responses that lead to reflection and self-reflection, forms of sentiment and feeling that catalyze the process of becoming aware of ourselves and our place in the world. It is a sensibility that is shaped by (and is scrupulously attentive to) the social conflicts of our times. Her work displays a distinctive habit of reflection on what it means to be alive and to be human not despite, but precisely in the midst of, the antagonisms and violence that are so omnipresent in our world.
- A.R. Mufti, 2012

With a remarkable career spanning more than five decades and as many countries, Zarina’s minimalist art evades much of the nomenclature intended to conveniently categorize and identify artists. Her work, which straddles the divide between the abstract and the representational, raises questions concerning meaning, stability, endurance, mobility, and the ephemeral nature of the concept of home. Delicately exploring ideas of family, belonging, displacement, memory and loss, perhaps the most autobiographical of the artist’s portfolios of prints is Letters from Home.

Zarina was born in the university town of Aligarh in Northern India in 1937, a decade before the partition of the Subcontinent, and India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule. While her family moved from Aligarh to Karachi following the Partition, Zarina married Saad Hashmi, a career diplomat, in 1958, and left India to accompany him on postings in Thailand, France, Germany and Japan. In 1976, after Saad’s passing, Zarina chose to stay in New York.

Speaking about this portfolio, Zarina wryly notes, “Many people have asked why I titled this portfolio Letters from Home when I have never lived in Pakistan. For me, home is not a place. It is wherever the people you care about most are waiting for you” (Artist statement, Letters from Home, Google Arts & Culture online, accessed August 2023). Among those she cared for, the artist’s sister Rani (Kishwar Chishti), was perhaps the family member she was closest to. Speaking about one of her visits with Rani, Zarina recalled, “Many years ago, when I was visiting her house, my sister Rani gave me six letters she had written to me but never posted. The letters were to let me know about deaths in the family, selling her beloved house and how much she had missed me at those times. Maybe she wrote these letters to herself; putting her emotions on scraps of paper might have helped her cope with her loss. I left home early in my twenties, and my sister’s letters were my connection to the family, culture, and language I grew up in. Rani wrote in Urdu. Few people read, let alone write letters in Urdu – it’s a dying script” (Artist statement, Z. Hashmi with S. Burney, Directions to My House, New York, 2018, p. 79).

In 2004, almost fifteen years after this visit, Zarina returned to these letters as inspiration for a series of prints. Working with fragments of Rani’s handwriting, overlaying it, cutting it out and striking it through, the artist created a suite of eight prints she titled Letters from Home. By this time, the concept of cartography also assumed great significance for Zarina, given both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her extensive travels and unique experience of geographic origin and identity. In works like the present lot, Zarina alludes not only to departures from material places, but also from memories and the familiarity of things like a native language.

The first print or letter in this portfolio is a twice-printed relief of one of Ran’s unsent letters; “it is not meant to be read. It is like a mashq (practice exercise) page. For me the recognition of Rani’s familiar handwriting sets the tone for this very personal series of prints” (Artist statement, Ibid., 2018, p. 79). In the following seven prints, Zarina integrates cartographic and architectural drawings, floor plans and city maps that have bearing on her itinerant life with related layers of text from Rani’s letters. Over fragments of a letter speaking of their father’s death, Zarina overlays a nineteenth century map of Aligarh and the floor plan of Sir Syed Hall where he used to teach; over a letter bearing news of their mother’s death, Zarina envisages a dark house as her final resting place; and over an emotional letter about having to sell her beloved home of thirty years, Zarina sets its blueprint as a kind of memorial. In this way, Letters from Home becomes a document of Rani’s emotions and experiences through the lens of Zarina’s memories. This work is an active exercise in both remembering and forgetting, and in the end, in healing. The last print in the portfolio returns to Rani’s first letter. However, this time Zarina prints parallel black lines over the text, “erasing the writing and blocking the memories with this futile gesture” (Artist statement, Ibid., 2018, p. 82).

In 2013, Zarina gifted an edition of this portfolio to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in honor of her sister, and the same year the Tate, London, acquired an edition of Letters from Home for their permanent collection. Other editions of this seminal portfolio are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. “In her long and illustrious artistic career, Zarina created several brilliant works through the mediums of drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. However, Letters from Home is the most personal among them and is crucial to understanding her oeuvre [...] On 25 April 2020, Zarina passed away, but her legacy continues to influence young artists. Her life and artistry are a testament to the fact that no matter the abyss of our personal struggles, we can always find an honest outlet for it through art” (V. Sarkar, ‘How Zarina Hashmi's Minimalist Art Intersects Identity, Memory, And The Idea Of Home’, Homegrown online, 12 June 2023, accessed August 2023).