The Dividing Line: Zarina, Abstraction, Representation

Landscape––as genre, as subject––has typically been taken up within histories of representation in literal terms, whether through painting, photography, drawing, or the moving image. This paper reconsiders landscape’s relation to representation through the work of Zarina (1937-2020), an internationally-trained artist born in undivided India, whose decades-long exploration of Partition and related notions of home/land, territories, borders, diaspora, and displacement through the lexicon of modernist abstraction––in particular, the line and the grid––constituted a distinctive rupture with the tradition of landscape’s pictorial representation.

Zarina combined her early training in mathematics and architecture with an artistic practice primarily focused on printmaking, developed through studies in Paris and Tokyo in the 1960s and 70s. Her precise use of the line on handmade paper—frequently annotated with Urdu calligraphy—take on landscapes of displacement and conflict, both in South Asian contexts (Dividing Line, 2001) and internationally: These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib), 2003. Other works like Atlas of My World (2001) and the woodblock series Home Is a Foreign Place (1999) combine the modernist grid with abstractions of interior landscapes: everyday architectures of domestic interiors that are dimly recalled in the aftermaths of geopolitical displacement. Zarina’s use of abstraction to evoke histories of, and encounters with, enduring crises of nationalisms, borders, and un/belonging contest the colonial foundations of various technologies and systems of representation. They resist the violence intrinsic to (re-)producing land as landscape, instead offering a space of potentiality.