Working primarily in handmade paper, Zarina is recognized for her minimal approach to the line. Born in Aligarh, India, in 1937, Zarina and her family were forced to leave the country permanently in 1959 as Muslim families were uprooted in the wake of Partition, which violently divided British India into the nations of India and Pakistan and led to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. She went on to live in several cities, including Paris and Tokyo, before finally settling in New York in 1976. Yet much of Zarina’s life and work continues to be shaped by her memories of dislocation and violence, manifesting in her work in rough, dividing lines that depict political borders and suggest collective memories of displacement.

This is a portfolio of nine woodcuts, each an aerial map of geographical borders and contested terrains scarred by political conflict: Sarajevo, Beirut, Ahmedabad, Grozny, Srebrenica, Kabul, Jenin, Baghdad, and New York. These cities are marked in the artist’s native language of Urdu, a linguistic culture that was ruptured by Partition. This connection to language is emphasized in the portfolio’s title, which references the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib and twentieth-century feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Evoking the ways in which war breaks apart homes, lives, languages, and landscapes, this portfolio speaks to a shared human experience of violence.