Countries

Countries brings together Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Holy Land—places marked by borders, war, occupation, and displacement. Zarina does not treat their maps as neutral diagrams. Each becomes a compressed field in which a political boundary is also a lived and remembered line.

The first four sheets retain recognizable territorial contours while carving, darkening, and abrading their interiors. In the final sheet, Holy Land, conventional cartography gives way to a stark vertical form: a border read as division, enclosure, and wall.

Urdu names each place from within Zarina’s own language. The words do more than label the maps; they bind distant geographies to memory, while the pressure of the woodcut turns line and surface into material witnesses.