London was Zarina’s final address, but not the conclusion of her geography. Aligarh, New York, and the many places between them continued to coexist in her work as remembered rooms, routes, borders, and words.
Zarina spent increasing time in London from 2018 and made it her final address. By then she had lived and worked across South and Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, and the United States; no single city could contain the whole account of home.
London did not replace Aligarh or New York. It entered a geography already layered by departure and return, where a room could be remembered across decades and a map could hold both an intimate history and a political rupture.
Frieze Masters · 2018
A long practice seen in London
At Frieze Masters in London in 2018, Luhring Augustine presented a survey of Zarina’s work from 1970 onward.
The presentation brought together a practice in which paper could be cut, pierced, cast, folded, and printed. Across those changes in material and scale, the recurring forms remained exacting: the house, the border, the route, the divided map, the Urdu word, and the dark field marked by light.
Memory without nostalgia
Retracing rather than returning
Zarina’s statement for Paper Houses offers a key to the late work. Retracing her steps was not an attempt to recover a lost life intact. It was a way to understand how many places, languages, and separations had produced the present.
A floor plan could therefore become a vessel for memory without becoming a literal reconstruction; an Urdu word could summon a place without restoring it. London was the last point on the route, not a final answer to the question of home. Zarina died there on 25 April 2020.
“I am not a writer; I needed to retrace my steps to places I have passed through to understand how I got here, at this place, at this point in time. I used the means available to me: a language of symbols and words. It has nothing to do with nostalgia; I have no desire to go back to pick up the threads of my old life.”
