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Zarina Hashmi made displacement and mobility central to an art shaped by printmaking, language and memory. Born in Aligarh, India, in 1937, she lived across several countries before settling in New York. Her spare forms—often built from architectural lines, maps and Urdu words—ask what it means to call a place home when history and movement keep unsettling that idea.
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Zarina’s experience of displacement began with her family’s loss of its home during the 1947 Partition of India. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the family as being displaced to either side of the new India–Pakistan divide. That history gave borders and separation a personal dimension in her later work, rather than leaving them as abstract political subjects.
As an adult, Zarina traveled internationally with her diplomat husband and lived in different cities. The Smithsonian American Art Museum reports that she earned a mathematics degree in 1958 and developed her practice in Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris and Tokyo. The Smithsonian dates her move to the United States to 1975; the Met says she settled in New York in 1976. These dates describe different stages—relocation to the country and settling in the city—and should not be treated as contradictory.
Even after establishing roots in New York, Zarina continued to identify with exile. In a Met interview, she said, “New York is not my home, this is someone else’s home. I’ve lived here for 40 years but my identity is basically that of an exile.” She also described a life lived in translation and spoke of the loss of Urdu poetry. Her reflections make belonging a complicated, personal condition, not simply a matter of where someone resides.
Why printmaking and paper matter in Zarina’s art
Zarina was principally known as a printmaker. The U.S. Department of State describes her work in intaglio, woodblock, lithography and silkscreen. She studied intaglio with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier-17 in Paris and woodblock printing in Tokyo. Her experience across printmaking communities and techniques informed an art that is formally restrained but attentive to how images are made.
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Paper is not merely a neutral surface in her work. In its account of Home Is a Foreign Place, the Met describes woodcuts with printed chine collé, pen and black ink on paper. Zarina used handmade plant-based papers alongside sturdier rag-based paper. The museum interprets the layering as a “metaphorical weaving of cultures”: differences in texture and construction carry meaning as well as supporting the image.
How to read Home Is a Foreign Place
Made in 1999, Home Is a Foreign Place is a portfolio of 36 woodcut prints. Each sheet pairs an abstract image with a word in Urdu, Zarina’s mother tongue. The Met connects the series to memories of home, a life lived across many places, and the way language can hold memory. The first folio shows a floor plan labeled ghar, a word that can mean both “house” and “home.” That double meaning sets up the series’ distinction between a physical structure and the sense of belonging attached to it.
Rank #2
- Over 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and conceptual pieces
- Length: 7.75in / 20cm, Depth: 2in / 5cm, Width: 6in / 15cm
- By Hans Werner Holzwarth
- Hardcover
- 696 pages
MoMA’s audio resource records Zarina explaining that language matters as much as image in the portfolio. She intended the prints to be read as a sequence, in rows from left to right, beginning at the top—not as a set of unrelated individual images. The words and forms accumulate as a meditation on how remembered places, language and identity travel with a person.
The Met relates the series to Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines (1997), in which Zarina mapped the homes of her peripatetic life through architectural outlines. When she faced eviction from the New York apartment that served as both home and studio, she developed Home Is a Foreign Place. Together, the works show how an outline of a building can register both a particular place and the uncertainty of belonging to it.
What Zarina’s spare forms make visible
Zarina’s geometry can look minimal at first glance, but its simplicity concentrates attention on borders, rooms, routes and words. Architectural plans give the idea of home a literal shape; shifts in paper and print surface make that shape tangible; Urdu brings language and memory into the image. The restraint does not remove emotion. It lets small changes in line, material and word carry the weight of migration and loss.
In the Met interview, Zarina said, “I think we are witnesses to the times we are living in.” Her work bears witness through intimate forms rather than spectacle: the plan of a house, the traces of a journey, a word that holds more than one meaning. Its recurring concerns—home, borders, memory and movement—remain rooted in her own history while inviting viewers to consider how place shapes identity.
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