NuktaArt in Conversation with Zarina Hashmi

By The NuktaArt Team

On a recent trip to Karachi – the city that Zarina Hashmi frequently visits – (to see her sister, Rani), she found time to speak to Nukta on issues of mutual concern, as they relate to perceptions of the visual arts in Pakistan and the implications of emerging forces that seem to influence, and the factors that shape the making of art in this region. Although there is no attempt to bring conclusive arguments, it is hoped that the openness of this dialogue provokes further discussion.

Zarina is based in New York City, and is a faculty member at Columbia University. She was born in Aligarh, India, and lived there until after her graduation in 1958. While living in Bangkok in the early 60s, she started making wood block prints, did silkscreen printing and later papermaking. As she continued her interest in printmaking she had the rare privilege to work with Stanley W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris.

She has been actively involved in art education, and for the first ten years (from 1979), she was with the New York Feminist Art Institute, and has held visiting positions at Bennington College, Cornell University, the Art Students’ League of NY, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

DIRECTIONS TO MY HOUSE

WHEN YOU COME OUT OF THE TRAIN STATION
TAKE A RICKSHAW TO THE TARWALABANGLA

YOU WILL COME OUT ON A RAILWAY ROAD
ON YOUR LEFT IS NAQVI PARK
NEXT TO A GOTHIC-LOOKING CLOCK TOWER
...THE NAME IS CARVED IN RED STONE
IN ENGLISH AND URDU….
….YOU CANNOT MISS ITS BOUGAINVILLEA-COVERED FENCE
IT SHOULD NOT TAKE YOU VERY LONG TO GET THERE
IT IS ONLY
 SEVEN THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED
AND THIRTY EIGHT MILES AWAY
- Zarina Hashmi

The distance from Aligarh to NewYork has been a journey that started in New York going back to the The House at Aligarh (1990), the first in the series of etchings and woodcuts that document Zarina’s journey back to ‘home’ which becomes an entity of childhood anecdotes such as of The Ghost stopped by the Pillar, or The One eyed Ayah; titles like At night I go to the house at Aligarh, Ammi waits for the motia blossoms, and Rani tells a story become the metaphors for the longing that comes with migration, and the painful distance separated by time. Muddat (Time) , Chawkhat (Entrance), Deewar (Wall) and many other prints reconstruct the notion of home which eventually becomes the square or circle and geometric configurations symbolizing the journey in the mind, as a state of being that links Zarina’s work to the idea of ‘disruption, disjuncture, unsettlement’. The House with Four Walls and other series done through the 90s each carries ‘an imprint of her personal recall’, pushing the boundaries of belonging, and ownership, making the borders of the dislocated porous. The artist retraces the route to her childhood home, often with a deep sense of nostalgia that seems to be the voice of a generation that now looks back after three or four decades of having settled and made America its home. And with this sense of loss emerge contradictions that become a symptom of the sub culture that exists in her generation.
 
NuktaArt: The architectonic elements in your work are very strong. Could they be coming from the Miniature?

ZH: Yes, I have looked at the Miniature, but I don’t think consciously. The house, floors, and courtyard are in my work because I have grown up in a house like that. But I don’t look at it as a picture like it is in the Miniature tradition. The square carries a lot of personal history. I have lived in Malevich’s square, and my square inhabits life, it carries a narrative; but the formal value is the square. 
I have always found it very confounding when the teacher tells you how, for example, to make an eye; there is a readymade template in that. But I never wanted to paint nature.  I never had a desire to make that sort of work. And somehow, I think I missed something along the way. 

NuktaArt: It is ‘another’ way of looking. Whatever experiments you are doing, you are doing in your language; something indigenous.

ZH: I was reading a recent review by Robert Smith in the New York Times…  Cameras were given to children of a brothel, and they were told to shoot, which became the work. Smith wrote that the East is so exotic to the Western eye that any body can pick up a camera and shoot something and people will like it.

NuktaArt: What is important is your own intellectual intervention in that situation.

ZH: Orhan Pamuk deals with this again and again in his text, My Name Is Red (Kara Kitap).
The question is, why can’t I do what you (in the West) do, but why can’t I also talk about my life and my culture? ‘They’ are still very uncomfortable the moment these questions are asked.

All these people, like Richard Sierra, Carl Andre, are my age group. But I am not one of them despite my having studied in the West. I will never be one of them. It is only now that they can relate it to India or the Islamic world that my work is being accepted. But I think that they are having a lot of trouble with it. I don’t think that we should play into that.

NuktaArt: The whole idea of approaching the ‘exotic’ is somehow problematic. In relation to Shazia Sikander’s successes, do you think it is so?

ZH: We look at Shazia Sikander’s early work, playing directly into their hands. But, then we haven’t yet seen enough of her work to be able to judge what she is capable of producing.

NuktaArt: There is Aisha Khalid who has had several residencies and shows all over the world. As a result, her prices at home have shot up. But here is an artist who is able to peal the baggage, and is very conscious of the whole notion of viewpoint; of the artist’s gaze, at the Western gaze looking at us, but not necessarily through another’s gaze.

ZH: Are we incapable of making a good picture, or a good film? Recently, I saw the film Mughal-e-Azam and was very pleased, and some body here commented that it became very popular in Germany. But why? I asked. Because it was ‘kitsch-exotica’?

Are we incapable of making a good painting or a good film? And why do we need authentication from the West? There are very few post independent Indian/Pakistani artists who have made it internationally, like Satyajit Ray, now an accepted film maker.

NuktaArt: Have you thought  why?

ZH: His (Ray’s) iconography is not melodramatic; he narrates in simple terms, and still manages to be convincing. For example, birds are flying in the sky, or that the raindrops are falling in the water...

Look at the brutality in Kurasava’s Seven Sumurai. Why? Any one can do that. But there are very few people who have crossed this border, and who are internationally accepted. I can’t think of one visual artist from the Sub-continent who has made the leap.

NuktaArt: What do you think of Souza, who lived in New York. What was his place?

ZH: He was a good painter to start with, and then he degenerated. His women with silicone breasts were pathetic.

NuktaArt: Let us look at his peak when he was in London in the 60s. He was recognized internationally then.

ZH: But he could not sustain it. The hardest thing is to sustain it. He was a good painter. I think that his evolution stopped.

NuktaArt: We seem to be having artists who have potential, but they somehow do not evolve beyond a point. Is it something cultural that does not sustain it? But looking around, there is Ahmed Parvez, Shakir Ali, Zahoorul Akhlaq…

ZH: I know Indian Art better. I hate putting it down because after all I am part of this tradition. I have lived in the U.S. for forty years, but I will be judged, be linked as an Indian. Something serious has gone wrong with our visual arts. The second generation comes to the U.S. from here, and they feel that they are inventing everything.  And they think that they are the Modernists, as if nothing happened before them. They don’t go deep enough into history; just looking at a few pictures in catalogues is not enough! And why this needs to get authentication from the West? They too ask me who my favorite artist or artists are and I say none. Is there something wrong with me? Did my connection break somewhere? Am I missing something? And it troubles me. If you ask who my favorite writer is, I’ll say I enjoy Arundhati Roy, etc. etc. But I can’t think of a visual artist who will set my heart beating. I cannot.

NuktaArt: Can you think of an artist from your own generation who will set your heart beating? What are you expecting from an artist? Are you judging her/him too harshly? Are you really looking into their art deeply enough?

ZH: When you look at Malevich’s or Kandinsky’s work, you see them as cutting edge, but when looking at our own, like Sadequain, for example, why were they a flash in the pan? Why did they not evolve?  There is more than forty years of work in front of us.

NuktaArt: Rasheed Araeen talks about the lack of critical nourishment. One of the things that make us critically aware is if people can critically write about our work. Then we can push ourselves further.

ZH: Whatever has come out of Pakistan in art, one person I regard highly is Rasheed Araeen. People may not know his name, but he dared to say what was going on. If you say that someone (else) has been successful or is more known, it doesn’t mean anything.  I was introduced to Araeen by Lucy Lippard. When the Black Phoenix came out, we said, ‘Oh, a Pakistani?’ Pakistan was always considered to be in the backwaters. That snobbism was always there in India. Now Pakistani artists have come into focus, and the Indians have suddenly woken up.

NuktaArt: That is also because they seem to be less informed about us than we are about them. There was a lot of socio-political work done during General Zia ul Haq’s regime. Maybe from the outside, they chose not to focus on it because they saw no issues here for them. You see our writings/documentation on art has largely been in newspaper articles, so the problem has been lack of documentation. Also the lack of museums…

ZH: But there was also no desire to do so on the part of the Indians.

NuktaArt: That’s the unfortunate thing. Look at Bangladesh…they have put themselves on the map through the Biennale.

ZH: I think that the Miniature has done a lot for Pakistan’s image. If it wasn’t for the contemporary Miniature movement, I don’t think that Pakistan would have been on the international map.

NuktaArt: You have answered your own question by saying that it is this that has made the West take notice of us. The Miniature has been an exploration of a particular language. If they can use the language and transcend beyond the formula miniature, then we have got a grip on something worth it.

ZH: Pakistan is sort of comfortably situated in the South Asian context which is not considered second best anymore. There are two ways of looking at it. I do doubt the motive of the West, because for them it is ‘exotica’.

NuktaArt: That, perhaps, only time will tell.

ZH: A lot of foreign reviews about Shazia Sikander’s work, for example, barely go into the tradition that she draws from. Those references and understanding of it seems very limited. They have to do their homework.

NuktaArt: From Aligarh to New York, you have had a long journey. When you look back, do you recall any turning points?

ZH: From the beginning I didn’t want to be like my mother. I wanted to be like my father, a scholar and an intellectual. I wanted to be something more because I was curious about things…books. My father used to take me to the library, so I was always surrounded by books, and so I read and I read. I did not know then what it meant to be an artist. Teachers have taught me a lot, but books have taught me most.

Then began the period of my life when I was on the road, with my husband, in the early 60s.  I was not just playing the housewife and entertaining, but because I came from an intellectual background, I read a lot, and we traveled a lot, and in Bangkok - our first destination - I saw a lot of architecture, which I studied. So information gathering was always part of my life. Saw my first print in Bangkok, and by the time we came back to Delhi I was into print. I later separated from my husband. But we have this prejudice against women who are married, and especially among the artists…as if you can’t be serious if you come from a comfortable background. That is very unfortunate. I guess this is because of a lack of awareness in our society and that was the thing I wished badly for women…

NuktaArt: You have to clear the rubbish, just like in every other field.

ZH: Yes and it takes time. An exit from India came in the form of a scholarship to Japan through the Japan Foundation. In India they said I will be very lucky if I lasted for even fifteen days, because they said that culturally it was so different. But I didn’t care if I didn’t ever come back. When I flew, I just wanted to keep on flying. When you are on the thermal and gliding on air, you can stay in the air longer, just like a bird…(also, I like the metaphor of the bird). I stayed in Japan for eight months, found myself a job and worked very hard.

NuktaArt: Then what made you leave India for New York?

ZH: My personal life was unsatisfactory. I had a lot of confidence when I had come back from Paris; had my first show in ’69. I had established myself as an artist and had good friends in India. I was familiar with a lot of theory. Artists like Tayyab Mehta, Raza, and Akber Padamsee were my buddies. And I got the President’s Award for Excellence. The first time I came back to India, I thought I’d never go back to the West. I had done what I had done, and my work was going well, but I was not sustained, nor content. I wanted more. I didn’t leave India; I just got tired of it…of always having to explain myself…

Although my family moved to Pakistan in 1959, I didn’t want to move with them because I was very influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy and Nehru’s secularism. Whatever we say, we have been very influenced culturally by the Hindus. When I was in college, Hinduism had always attracted me and yes, we are culturally inclined to them. It’s just that we don’t say it. It was my own decision not to come to Pakistan.

NuktaArt: Was it a level of intellectual engagement you were looking for that made you break away?

ZH: Yes. And the problem for Indians at the time was that everything had to be Indian; my work was not enough ‘Indian’.

NuktaArt: So it was not addressing preconceived ideas?

ZH: No, not at all. The work always got the reaction of my being a Muslim artist and so on.

NuktaArt: What about Tayyab Mehta, he used to do the figure and was doing well.

ZH: But I was doing non-figurative work. Before, I also used to paint in the format of the Bengal school…of women with big eyes, sitting, or carrying water in urns… Then I came to a point and asked what it is that I had been doing. What saved me also was reading. I learnt a lot.

In the mid 70s I met, among others, Marion Shapiro, and with her and others joined the editorial board of Heresies, the publication for feminist writings. I think they took me in the core group because I was a good worker, and also because I added color by being an Indian. I was an outsider, an Indian girl; an ‘honorary alien’. I was very critical of them and very shocked by the level of discrimination in America, although these were leftist liberals. They, in turn were very critical of me because I used to confront them, but for them here was this educated Indian girl, not one of them. We had also set up an open discussion each Sunday, like an open house, where there were artists, writers, etc. who converged to discuss issues.

I was in a show once in which there was a lot of monotony. But I agreed to include my work because I thought that at least some people would see it.  Whether the show went off well or not, but the color of the visible minority or whatever we call it, was there, and I was seen and included as that. I think America, white America would never, never include us.  That is my disappointment after thirty years of work in the US.

NuktaArt: Is it worse now, after 9/11?

ZH: Now we have divisions of non-white Americans: Asian Americans, Latin Americans…

But the bashing is so strong after September 11 that a historian from India said to me that if you wanted to commit suicide, you couldn’t have gone to any other place better than America. September 11 was when I was between my country of birth and my country of adoption… but it has betrayed me. India has betrayed me too by what they have done in Gujarat and then it happened in the country that adopted us. We have nowhere to go.

NuktaArt: We are all faced with the questions of fundamentalism as they are calling it, from which is born fanaticism; and they are also talking about an enlightened Islam…

ZH: You are enlightened or not, you are a Muslim.  You are condemned by your name. They will discriminate against you because you offer prayers.

NuktaArt: The MoMA has bought your work. We see that important archives have your works.  How will you justify that and what is the connection? Are they collecting ‘multicultural’ works now?

ZH: When the Victoria and Albert Museum bought my work, they said to me that they had to create a link to their collection that was colonial. They wanted to buy contemporary ‘Asian’ Art. They say that Raza’s exhibitions in America were mostly sold. But the question is who bought his work? Rich Indians had bought it. Whenever there was an auction, it was a rare phenomenon to see any white people.

NuktaArt: In which category is the MoMA looking at it: as ‘good’ international art maybe?

ZH: I think that they are looking at it that way. They are not worried about it being ‘Indian’ or not. They saw quality and they bought it. They bought my work in ’73, and it was abstract at that time.

NuktaArt: In the larger context, there is a lot of nostalgia in the work of artists who have made other homes or have moved…

ZH: Basically, I am talking about myself. I have to look at my own self.  I am not dying to go back to Aligarh. I just want to look at my life in context, and how it has affected me.  The nostalgic memories are there in the silence of this work, which was very painful, what I had gone through. I don’t talk about my personal life, but I do talk about my family; I think of them as an illusion now.  They are gone and what do I go back to…

…How did I end up here? I have regrets. There is pain… and this is the world… and especially when I am coming to my end.  I don’t know how many years I have left; it’s just that I would like to die in the Subcontinent. I don’t want to become a burden on people here.  I have been financially independent; I have been emotionally independent. I want to take care of myself… I am thinking of writing this down in a book.