She has said: ‘Home is always an interior reality, which, with a floor plan, I can walk through again and again in my imagination.’ (Zarina Hashmi, ‘54th Venice Biennale: Zarina Hashmi (India)’, ART iT, June 2011, paragraph 9,, accessed 6 July 2012.) While functioning as an inventory of Hashmi’s life experiences, Letters from Home also serves as a poignant reminder of her dislocated status. Through the representation of memories in Letters from Home, Hashmi creates a place of shelter in a foreign land. Homes, floor plans and routes are printed onto the letters, presenting Hashmi’s life as an atlas, one that is both a universal document and a record of personal experience. Working with actual geographical locations, Hashmi acts as cartographer, preserving communication from her sister within the sites of her own memories.
The portfolio functions as a series of maps that trace the artist’s journeys and record the places in which she has lived. Letters from Home draws on a range of sources, from Hashmi’s childhood home in pre-partition India to her sojourns across the world. She has said: ‘Home is the centre of my universe I make a home wherever I am.’ (Zarina Hashmi, ‘A Conversation with Zarina in New York with Geeti Sen’, in Gallery Espace 2006, p.13.) As a consequence, themes of the house and home play an important part in Hashmi’s work.
They moved from Delhi in India to Karachi in Pakistan, where Hashmi’s sister still lives. Immediately after her departure, her family was required to relocate due to the partition of India and Pakistan, resulting in the loss of the family home. Since her departure from India in 1958 to accompany her husband Saad Hashmi, a military officer engaged in international diplomacy, in his travels around the world, the artist has moved frequently between cities, countries and continents. As the title indicates, Letters from Home acts as a preserved archive of the letters sent to Hashmi by her sister over a period of time. The series was made in Hashmi’s New York studio in 2004. Hayter (1901–1988) at Atelier 17 in Paris from 1963 to 1967, and Letters from Home reflects her training across a variety of printmaking techniques. Hashmi studied printmaking with the renowned English painter and printmaker S.W. Hashmi printed the works herself, publishing the portfolio in an edition of twenty, of which Tate’s copy is number nine.
The letter imprint was then surrounded or overlaid by the outline of a house, a floor plan or the map of a geographical location, using a woodblock print. From the letters, the artist made printing plates which she used to print onto handmade Kozo paper. Letters from Home is a portfolio of eight monochromatic woodblock and metalcut prints, produced using original letters written in Urdu to Zarina Hashmi by her sister Rani.
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