Zarina
Detailed installation view of ZARINA’s Hanging in There, 2000, wire and linen thread, 112 units total, each unit 11.4 x 2.5 cm, at “Beyond the Stars,” Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Lines took on new meaning when I received my first atlas in kindergarten. Though my grasp of the world was limited, I remember learning about East and West Germany; the falling of the Berlin Wall could not alter the borders printed on those maps. Sometimes dotted lines separated neighbors over disputed territories—an ambiguity that must have been confusing. Who gets to draw these lines? I wondered. While the Earth is not marked like a jigsaw, the late Indian-born artist Zarina returned to the formal qualities of these invisible, arbitrary divisions—barriers that have drastically changed countless lives, including her own. Her black-and-white woodblock prints deftly navigate positive and negative space. Through carving, inking, rolling, pressing, and further manipulation of the paper, she distilled a lifetime of crossings into expansive, emotional landscapes bounded by the edge of the printing block.
Six years after her passing, Luhring Augustine presents Zarina’s first posthumous solo exhibition at its Tribeca gallery. The selection—prints, collages, cast paper works, and wall-based sculptures spanning seven decades—carries the weight of impermanence shaped by postwar politics, as well as the condition of lifelong exile. Drawn from different periods across her career, the works reflect a transient life punctuated by both literal and imagined lines on maps.
The Partition of India took place in 1947 when Zarina was 10 years old, and her family was among the millions of Muslims who relocated to the newly formed Pakistan before the imposed deadline. Often described as one of the largest mass migrations in history, the Partition was also among the bloodiest that ended up being a genocide, leaving a jagged line between India and Pakistan that endures as a scar. A recurring subject in Zarina’s work, this border—drawn by the British lawyer Cyril John Radcliffe (1899–1977)—appears in Dividing Line (2001) and Abyss (2013). Displayed side by side, the former presents a single black line halving the paper from top to bottom, while the latter renders a white, hatched void—a ghostly cliff splitting a dark, rectangular subcontinent. Zarina studied printmaking while shuttling around the globe as a diplomat’s wife, “writing” stories from her perspective in ink with a carving knife. Following her husband’s death, she settled in New York in 1976, where she lived and worked thereafter. Her nomadic existence surfaces in Mapping the Dislocations (2001), in which woodblock-printed lines tracing her movements are cut out and mounted on white paper, adding a sense of suspension.
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