Architecture
Home, threshold, entrance, wall, corner, and distance begin with the structures through which a remembered house can be entered and measured.
Portfolio · 1999
Home Is a Foreign Place
A poem in images and Urdu words—one of Zarina’s defining meditations on memory, language, and the idea of home.
Date1999
FormatThirty-six woodcuts, each paired with an Urdu word
MediumWoodcuts with letterpress additions and Urdu text
SheetApproximately 16 × 13 in. (40.7 × 33 cm), each
Edition25, with 5 artist’s proofs
The portfolio comprises thirty-six woodcuts, each pairing an abstract image with a word written in Urdu, Zarina’s mother tongue. Read from left to right in six rows, the sequence moves through architecture, weather, time, distance, and loss.
The portfolio begins with a spare plan of the house in Aligarh and the word ghar—both house and home. Its vocabulary turns memory into a sequence of thresholds, walls, seasons, and celestial signs.
The work followed an earlier sequence of nine homes and was made while Zarina faced losing the New York loft that had served as both residence and studio. The immediate threat of displacement sharpened a subject she had carried for decades.
Each image was carved and printed as an “idea-image” responding to a chosen word. Fine handmade papers were printed and mounted onto stronger sheets, allowing material from different papermaking traditions to meet within a single portfolio.
Reading the sequence
From room to world
The sheets operate individually and as one unfolding structure.
Atmosphere
Morning, dawn, afternoon, hot breeze, rain, and night recover place through sensation and the passage of time rather than through a complete narrative.
Signs and loss
Roads, maps, celestial forms, despair, and hope move the portfolio beyond one house toward migration, separation, and the unstable idea of return.
Complete sequence
Words in their original order
The complete sequence brings together images and Urdu words through which Zarina reflected on memory, displacement, and the shifting idea of home.
Individual sheets
Words that trigger memory
Each sheet in the complete sequence opens its larger photograph below, preserving the paper edge, inscriptions, and Urdu word.
Before and after
Home across related works
Father’s House 1898–1994
1994
Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines
1997