Zarina Hashmi, who lives and works in New York, traces her memory through a mystifying web of maps and charts.

They embody the experienced, the remembered, and the imagined. Such is the pan-universal appeal of Zarina Hashmi’s work, that it has been widely exhibited in solo as well as group exhibitions in prestigious venues across India, the US, Singapore and Europe.

This world famous artist of Indian origin is known for her print-making skills having trained under the renowned print-maker, S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17, France. She also studied under Krishna Reddy.She has won residencies at the Women’s Studio Workshop and at Art-Omi in Omi, both in New York.

Her new exhibition just opened at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York. Working extensively in an amazing abstract, minimalist idiom, she constructs symbolic maps, which chart both physical and metaphoric journeys and dis/locations, inscribing experiences and memories through the complex geometry of ‘Shadowlines’ and borders.

Her ‘Atlas of My World’ (2001), for example, is a woodcut that represents not just physical borders on a map but the actual barriers one encounters in life. ‘The House with Four Walls’ is a nostalgic portfolio of prints, through which she revisits her childhood memories in Aligarh.

For example, her sister, who now is settled in Pakistan, was the subject of her series of woodcuts exhibited in 2005 at Bose Pacia. They incorporated the Urdu texts of letters she penned, but never actually sent…They were about the aging and departure of loved ones. The artist superimposed the text onto curious geometric patterns: a street map of her home town Aligarh, a floor plan of their former house.

Zarina Hashmi’s work, though firmly entrenched in this milieu, has gradually progressed to considerations traversing beyond personal memory and nostalgia. Her ‘Cities, Countries and Borders’ is part of an ongoing meditation of extremely personal and peculiarly political geographies. It is an effort to situate oneself in the landscape of shifting cities and countries, continually destabilized by territorial claims and ensuing wars.