Home Is a Foreign Place - by Anayah Tora
A collection of things I’ve seen. This week’s story I first saw on The Met’s Instagram page commemorating the life of the late artist, Zarina.
Time, Home Is a Foreign Place, Zarina, 1999.
Zarina is a woodblock printer born in Northern India. Her series, Home Is a Foreign Place, consists of 36 woodblock prints featuring her own narrative of the house she was born in then left at 21 and never returned to.
The elements of the prints are simple, a word written in the traditional nastaliq script of the Urdu language and the monochromatic design that accompanies it. Zarina says, “I wrote the words first and then the image followed” in conversation with Hammer Museum.
Stillness, Home Is a Foreign Place, Zarina, 1999.
Zarina traveled for 20 years before arriving in New York in 1975. She says that human beings are supposed to travel and are nomadic creatures, “I think still is a death.” And in the above print, Stillness, it also describes the still hot air in the Indian summer.
Zarina describes her identity as an exile as she feels she cannot return to her childhood home. She describes Urdu in this interview as a people, a dying people. Language is what she carries when she is so far away from home. “My mother tongue is a dying language…There was a certain time the language existed. There was once a time that people like me existed.” When you leave the place of your language you do not know next when you will speak it or with whom. Zarina holds it closely in all of her work and through using it speaks to the few who can read it and understand the cultural connotation of these words.
Threshold, Home Is a Foreign Place, Zarina, 1999.
It is like print Threshold that is also a part of this series. Yes, literally it is the threshold of a house but in Urdu, دہلیز, it also means waiting for permission to enter a private space. These two meanings shown in script and also in print shows the complexity of Zarina who understands and if familiar to both of these meanings but belongs to neither.
Father’s House, Zarina, 1994. My House, Zarina, 1994. Home, Home Is a Foreign Place, Zarina, 1999.
With the series, Zarina first wrote a list of words that sparked feelings of nostalgia and that made her feel at home. The prints above are the same layout of her Father’s home in Aligarh where she grew up. The first labels rooms and even the trees outside in the garden in Urdu, the second print is a much darker place, and the third places it with light and cleaner lines. Less detail with each print and feeling most likely shows her attitude towards home at the time of its creation.
Afternoon, Home Is a Foreign Place, Zarina, 1999.
Despite the title implying that home is foreign or unknown to the artist, the words are intimate and describes scenes she cannot return to. The above print titled, Afternoon, is of a ceiling fan. Zarina says that she cannot think of an Indian summer afternoon without thinking of the fan’s blades in the high afternoon.
Letter From Home IV, Letters From Home, Zarina, 2004.
“My sister was writing to me informing me that our mother passed away and the sister passed away, house has been sold. And I thought put that letter in a house, so that my mother will have a house.” - Zarina in an interview with the Tate museum
It is not only words and geometric lines that speak to Zarina, it is the paper that she prints on. Zarina’s series Paper Like Skin focuses on the mode in which she shares her narrative. Most of the artist’s prints are done on handmade paper. “Paper is very close to skin because it ages, stains, keeps secrets” she says with Hammer Museum. It has a sense of fragility that mirrors our connection to home when we are so far away from it. But paper also holds things together, we know our past because of paper, we know of cultures and poetry because of paper, and because of that it is also strong as it crosses the boundaries of time.
Skin tells the story of our bodies and Zarina lets paper tell the story of her journeys.
— Anayah
For more information:
Interview with Tate - 'My Work is About Writing’
Interview with Hammer Museum - Zarina: Paper Like Skin
*All images retrieved from artist’s website*
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