The House at Aligarh

“The notion of home remains immensely important to Zarina at the same time that she is acutely aware of its impermanence and mutability. She speaks, therefore, of a need to create homes for herself that are as much psychic dwellings as actual physical locations in the world. Even as her travels have taken her to lands spanning the globe, Zarina’s gaze has often turned back to the childhood home in India that she was compelled to leave so long ago. Although the artist does not speak of her formative experience in terms of trauma, it might be said that this separation engendered a yearning to revisit this site of rupture and to try to recover and reconstitute, through acts of memory, what had been lost. With a repertoire of simple, abstract shapes that serve as mnemonic devices to trigger connections to her past, Zarina imaginatively returns to the site from which her journeys began, her father’s house at Aligarh.” (M. Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Durham, 2009, p. 216)