Reveling in the Multicultural Possibilities of Paper

Reveling in the Multicultural Possibilities of Paper

‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin,’ at the Guggenheim Museum

David Heald, 2012 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

“Ten Thousand Things,” small paper collages recreating Zarina’s works.

“Paper is an organic material, almost like human skin,” the artist Zarina Hashmi has said. “You can scratch it, you can mold it. It even ages.” In “Zarina: Paper Like Skin,” Ms. Hashmi’s exhibition at the Guggenheim, it’s that and more: paper is sculpture, poetry, currency and, above all, a kind of permanent home for a nomadic spirit.

“Dividing Line,” a woodcut representing the border between India and Pakistan.

Zarina (professionally, she goes by her first name only) is one of those artists who seem, upon the occasion of a midcareer retrospective like this one, to have been hiding in plain sight. Born in the northern Indian city of Aligarh in 1937, she has lived mainly in New York since the mid-1970s â€" attracted by, among other things, the Minimalism of artists like Carl Andre and Richard Serra and the feminism of Lucy Lippard. Although she is associated with both of those movements, her frequent references to Urdu poetry and other artistic and literary traditions of Southeast Asia have made it difficult for curators to fit her into any one box.

On the basis of works like “Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines,” you might consider her a citizen of the world; this series of vaguely Mondrian-like etchings is based on blueprints from the artist’s periods of residence in Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and New York. Another work, “Mapping the Dislocations,” connects the dots on her itinerary with black strips collaged onto white Nepalese paper.

Her art speaks poignantly, though sometimes opaquely, of relocation and exile. The violent partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which displaced Ms. Hashmi’s Muslim family, is referred to in her 2001 woodcut “Dividing Line.” To represent the border between the countries, she did not simply carve the snaking diagonal out of the wooden printing block; instead she gouged out the surrounding space, making clear that adjusting national boundaries is never as simple as drawing a line on a map.

The more cryptic “Home Is a Foreign Place” (1999), a portfolio of 36 woodcuts on handmade Japanese paper, might be seen as an attempt to translate Urdu words into black-and-white abstractions. “Dust” (the title also appears on the piece in Urdu script), somewhat mysteriously, is represented by a black rectangle; “Despair,” unnervingly, features two clusters of vertical lines that bring to mind fingernails clawing at a wall.

It helps, here and elsewhere in the show, to know that the Urdu language is becoming extinct in India and that Urdu poetry, as the scholar Aamir R. Mufti writes in the catalog, is “obsessively concerned with experiences of loss and disappointment.”

You might say the same of Ms. Hashmi, especially in the ruminative second half of the exhibition. The more stimulating first half, however, finds her reveling in the material and multicultural possibilities of paper. The works here, from the late 1960s and early ’70s, coincide with a period spent on the road as a diplomat’s wife. (Ms. Hashmi married in 1958; her husband died in 1977.)

In Paris she read Sartre and Beauvoir and saw works by Brancusi, whose limestone carving “The Kiss” inspired her early relief print of the same title (made from two side-by-side blocks of lightly inked wood). Other prints made with the same collaged-wood technique, on Indian handmade paper, remind you that paper is wood â€" wood pulp, anyway â€" and that every drawing or print is therefore a kind of sculpture.

That idea is reinforced in wall reliefs from the early 1980s, raised grids and indented squares made from cast and pigmented paper (sometimes brushed with gold or aluminum powder).

It finds its most eloquent expression, however, in Ms. Hashmi’s “Pin Drawings,” a mesmerizing series of works made by piercing sheets of white paper with needles of various sizes. (The 20 examples on view were recently acquired by the Guggenheim.) Dating from 1977, they are conversant with Postminimalism and Process art but feel, somehow, more private. The closely spaced punctures, displayed raised-side up, bring to mind braille, henna tattoos and, most relevant to the show’s title, enlarged pores.

“Zarina: Paper Like Skin,” which comes to New York from Los Angeles,where it was organized by the Hammer Museum, has been supervised here by the Guggenheim’s former associate curator of Asian art, Sandhini Poddar, and the museum’s assistant curator, Helen Hsu.

It includes a retrospective within a retrospective: Ms. Hashmi’s “Ten Thousand Things” a set of small paper collages recreating works from her oeuvre. (It’s a work in progress, initiated in 2009, but it’s meant to be comprehensive.) It was inspired, Ms. Hashmi says in an interview with Ms. Poddar, by Duchamp’s “boite en valise” â€" a whole career packed into a suitcase, and an ideal point of reference for this itinerant artist.

“Zarina: Paper Like Skin” continues through April 21 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

A version of this review appeared in print on February 1, 2013, on page C28 of the New York edition with the headline: Reveling in the Multicultural Possibilities of Paper.