Artist in Residence

Shapeshifting homes, houses on wheels and diagrammatic dwellings: Zarina’s solo at the KNMA underscores a preoccupation with the shifting idea of identity, suggests Meera Menezes.

- Meera Menezes

A recurring image in Zarina: A Life in Nine Lines | Across Decades – Borders – Geographies, which runs from the 30th of January to the 3rd of June at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, is that of a house on wheels. Striking in its simplicity, in many ways, it perfectly embodies the life of the itinerant artist. In fact, a row of such homes pops up in a work titled House on Wheels right at the entrance of the gallery, setting the tone for the show, sensitively curated by Roobina Karode.

Fashioned from a combination of elementary geometric forms – a triangle, a square, a circle–the motif takes on different avatars through the exhibition. There is the bronze I went on a journey perched on a shelf, the set of ten homes in Home I made, a multiple of five houses in Moving House II and the wall-mounted Ghar with wheel fashioned from cast paper with terra rosa pigment.

While this house-in-perpetual-motion echoes Zarina’s own peripatetic existence, it is also indicative of her preoccupation over the decades with vexed notions of home, homeland and identity as a diasporic Indian artist. The wheels were set in motion by her marriage to an Indian diplomat in 1958, which took her round the globe. It was in Bangkok that she encountered her first Japanese woodcut and she honed her printmaking techniques in Paris and Japan, later moving onto the United States, where she settled in a rented loft in New York. These various homes have often made an appearance in her works, for instance in the poetic Home I Made, A life in Nine Lines