.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“Zarina is a thinking person’s artist. Her practice appears calm, quiet, collected, and free of the desire for spectacular effects and monumentality. She seems intent on inviting emotional responses that lead to reflection and self-reflection, forms of sentiment and feeling that catalyze the process of becoming aware of ourselves and our place in the world. It is a sensibility that is shaped by (and is scrupulously attentive to) the social conflicts of our times. Her work displays a distinctive habit of reflection on what it means to be alive and to be human not despite, but precisely in the midst of, the antagonisms and violence that are so omnipresent in our world.” (A.R. Mufti, ‘Zarina’s Language Question’, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 151)
In Tears of the Sea, Zarina explores and complicates ideas of memory, migration and home, recurrent across her practice, extending them to a discourse on the postcolonial anxieties of a newly independent nation state and its people. Drawing upon her family’s traumatic experiences of migration during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, Zarina invokes the sense of displacement and loss of home in her work. This work references the sea as a liminal space between divisive borders on the land. It calls for a shift in narrative from one tethered to boundaries of nations and nationalities to one that acknowledges the interstitiality of the seas between them.
Meticulously embroidering freshwater pearls on ninety-nine sheets of paper, the artist uses pearls as a metaphor for the tears of the sea. She arranges the pearls vertically in columns of identical pieces of paper, creating a symmetrical composition reminiscent of the beauty and rhythm of waves lapping on the shore. The stark white of the pearls stands out against the muted shades of the handmade paper, highlighting the subtle gestures that distinguish her work from that of her contemporaries.
In Tears of the Sea, Zarina explores and complicates ideas of memory, migration and home, recurrent across her practice, extending them to a discourse on the postcolonial anxieties of a newly independent nation state and its people. Drawing upon her family’s traumatic experiences of migration during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, Zarina invokes the sense of displacement and loss of home in her work. This work references the sea as a liminal space between divisive borders on the land. It calls for a shift in narrative from one tethered to boundaries of nations and nationalities to one that acknowledges the interstitiality of the seas between them.
Meticulously embroidering freshwater pearls on ninety-nine sheets of paper, the artist uses pearls as a metaphor for the tears of the sea. She arranges the pearls vertically in columns of identical pieces of paper, creating a symmetrical composition reminiscent of the beauty and rhythm of waves lapping on the shore. The stark white of the pearls stands out against the muted shades of the handmade paper, highlighting the subtle gestures that distinguish her work from that of her contemporaries.