INTERVIEWS By Sadia Shirazi Posted on March 8, 2018 This interview with Zarina considers the artist’s life and work as a bridge between New Delhi and New York, weaving together distinct temporalities and traditions of modernism and abstraction, and hereby potentially also challenging canonical histories of feminism and post-minimalism in the 1970s in New York. In the May/June 1970 issue of Vrishchik,1 there is a conversation between six Indian printmakers in Delhi that includes the artist Zarina. “On Printmaking” was initiated by the editors of the journal, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar, both well-known artists in their own rights, after a Smithsonian printmaking workshop in Delhi that they had all participated in. Zarina’s contributions to the conversation pivot around formal considerations regarding questions of color, variation, and reproduction in printmaking, and an insistence upon thinking of printmaking as a unique visual medium. This issue of Vrishchik includes an image of Zarina’s Cage (1970), a black-and-white relief print made from collaged wood, along with other prints by the Indian artists. In 1979 Zarina, now in New York, was on the guest editorial staff of “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other,” a special issue of the feminist publication Heresies. This editorial group included “painters, poets, educators, multi-media artists, students, shipbuilders, sculptors, playwrights, photographers, socialists, craftswomen, wives, mothers and lesbians.”2 Zarina was the only South Asian in the group, indicated by the descriptor in the editorial statement that describes an “Indian (from New Delhi).” Zarina’s cast-paper sculpture Wall (1979) was included in the issue, which she designed, along with images of artworks by Beverly Buchanan, Ana Mendieta, Betye Saar, and others that were interspersed between the essays and poetry. 1 of 10 Vrishchik 1, no. 7/8 (May/June, 1970). Courtesy of the archive of Gulam Mohammad Sheikh Sadia Shirazi: What was it like being an artist in Delhi in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Zarina: Delhi was very exciting in the seventies. There were lectures and discussions. I was living in Delhi when Nasreen [Mohamedi] came back from Kuwait or Bahrain and Tyeb Mehta came back from New York—he [Mehta] always loved books and movies—we’d go to Old Delhi and I’d buy paper.3 Tyeb’s place was our adda.4 When I first returned to Delhi from Paris, I brought a lot of paper with me—French paper, and BFK and all.5 Then, in Delhi, I started studying the tradition we have, because the Indian market was feeding the colonies and people had no jobs, and our papermaking had gone down because it was cheaper to buy imported paper. So I started using handmade paper, Indian made from the Gandhi ashram. SS: What did you like about the Indian handmade paper compared to the paper from France? Z: It was very good quality; it was very even. I liked the rawness of it. SS: I found these pamphlets for workshops where you taught papermaking at the New York Feminist Art Institute in the late seventies and eighties. Z: By that time, I had decided that I would learn how to make paper and where it comes from, because I wanted to know more about the material. I know chemistry, so I knew paper is made from cotton. You make a pulp of it, and you put it in 2 of 10 water. With a lot of water, you don’t need any glue—it’s called hydrogen bonding— but if I hadn’t studied chemistry, I wouldn’t have understood that. I think timing is everything. When I came here, there was the revolution in handmade paper—in Santa Cruz, in New York, all over the place, so the timing was right. I taught a class on the ABC’s of papermaking, and I suddenly thought, this material has the potential of being cast. Not a plaster cast or a shell. I had moved and I didn’t have space or money, so I devised my own mold with wood, and I took a plastic sheet and drilled holes in it so the paper would drain out and also take on the surface of the plastic, so it would shine. So, in the seventies, in New York, I made my first cast-paper sculpture. “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other,” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, issue 8, vol. 2, no. 4 (1979) SS: You were also part of the editorial collective of the Heresies “Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other” issue. You were the only South Asian woman but one of two Muslims, which wasn’t a category of interest as it is today and isn’t mentioned anywhere in the publication. It’s interesting how explicit your editorial group’s introduction is about the problems your collective had with the main Heresies collective, which is described in the introduction as “racist and paternalistic.” Z: I always read the Heresies issue as being about third-class artists. We were not part of the first world because we were not Europeans, we were not white. We were communists and leftists. I really didn’t like the term third world. It felt like a negative designation . there was not one person of color in Heresies. Feminism for me was about equal pay for equal work—not about burning bras. Then they invited me to join the collective and I said no. They were horrible to me! I didn’t 3 of 10 want to work for them. SS: It’s not just you, as a person, who was unintelligible, I imagine, but also your work, which was quite distinct from the process-based “feminist” work coming from the Heresies collective at that time. Z: They’d say my work is very abstract and very minimal. I didn’t know what minimal was. I’d never heard the term, because I didn’t go to an art school. SS: You were also a co-curator of the exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in United States (1980) with Ana Mendieta and Kazuko Miyamoto at A.I.R. Gallery. You designed that catalogue, along with the Heresies one. Z: Yes. Ana was part of A.I.R. Gallery. She wanted me to be part of it, too, but they didn’t want to have me. They thought I was an upper-class Indian [laughter].6 I took editing classes at the New School for the Heresies publication, to learn how to edit. SS: I know that you had a network of friends in New York—from the Reddys, who had been in Paris with you, to Ram Rahman, who you knew from Delhi and who introduced you to Mehlli Gobhai.7 What did you do on Friday nights as a young artist in New York? Any memorable stories? Z: For me, Friday evenings were for going to the Met. I could just see anything I wanted. All the guards knew me because they were all artists. Once on the Lower East Side, at Kenkeleba House, Judy [Reddy]8 turned around and asked for a cigarette, and it was Philip Glass she asked! Then she said, “Oh, never mind.” [Laughter] Nobody was a star; you could run into people. People were accessible. SS: When you move to the United States, your work grows in a certain sense from your dislocation. You bring things together in a way that has an uncanny effect; first you take the horizon from the etchings in Santa Cruz (1996), which you pair with Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry, and reduce the horizon formally in Subh (Morning) and Raat (Night) from Home Is a Foreign Place (1999), a work that recalls everyday life in Aligarh.9 4 of 10 Zarina, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999 © 2018 Zarina; Acquired through the generosity of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Edgar Wachenheim III Z: In Santa Cruz, there was a beautiful sunset on Monterey Bay, and the lights going up—twilight they call it—it was so beautiful.10 Then I thought of Faiz’s “kai baar us ka daaman bhar diya husn-e-do aalam se” and then there is a misra, “magar dil hai ki us ki khana virani nahin jaati,”11 which is in the Santa Cruz portfolio. I wanted to do ten but time was running out and so I just did this one, Santa Cruz (1996). SS: In your work from the late 1970s in New York, you begin to explore space, sculpture, and materiality, the untitled pin drawings, your cast-paper sculptures, and then your bronze sculptures . Z: The space—I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t go into sculpture—that helped me. 5 of 10 Until I did this sculpture [points to bronze sculpture on wall]—I did it in New York. SS: Your work makes a lot of use of modes of spatial representation, from aerial maps of cities to architectural floor plans. How did you begin working with maps? Z: I had a small map from an atlas, and I blew it up. I’ve always been interested in geography and how cities are laid out. My father took me on a joyride in a plane over Aligarh when I was a child, and I saw how the city was laid out. I sat in his lap—it must have still been during British India. I flew a glider later, myself, in Delhi. SS: I know you wanted to study architecture as a child and have had a lifelong interest in it.