Emblematic of the artist’s fractured roots, Dividing Line (2001) depicts the geographical line that demarcates India from Pakistan. Born in 1937 in Aligarh, India, Zarina experienced firsthand the fallout of the Partition in 1947 when her Muslim family became separated between the two newly created states. Yet in the woodcut printed on Indian paper, there are no signifiers to denote which side is which—nothing to reflect the people, their culture or religion. All we see is a thick, jagged rupture, its abstract appearance indicative of the arbitrary nature of political boundary-making. Some twelve years later, Zarina returned to the dividing line, this time inversing its black and white spaces—with the land in Abyss (2013) rendered as an opaque, inky field, the focal point is placed entirely on the line, underscoring how its historical impact still reverberates today.

More than anything, Zarina feels like an exile. “I call it a life on the road,” she said, referring to the many different cities and countries she has lived in since leaving India at the age of 21. The only sculpture included among the paper-based works, I Went On a Journey (1991) encapsulates the artist’s extensive travels with the wheels of the house-like cart facing all four directions. She further chronicled the shifting notion of belonging in Cities I Called Home (2010), which comprises five woodcut prints, each mapping a different locale. In the image of her hometown, a square symbol represents the house in which she grew up. A black-and-white photograph of the actual structure hangs nearby. The series then jumps to Bangkok, New Delhi and Paris before finally arriving in her current home of New York.

More recently, however, Zarina has turned her attention to crossings made by refugees, such as those fleeing Syria. A white paper boat floats in the blackness of a sea in A Child’s Boat for Aylan and Ghalib (2015), paying homage to two young boys, Alan and Ghalib Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean with their mother while attempting to reach Greece. In Sinking Boat with a Heartbeat (2015), Zarina traces part of an electrocardiogram onto the outline of a vessel as a way to not only remind the viewer of the loss of life but also for us to consider what it would be like to put ourselves in that same position. An individual’s heartbeat does not differentiate between place of origin, race or religion. It is universal. Of course, a displaced person’s perilous journey does not end with the voyage. From boats to tents, the paper forms in Refugee Camp (2015) bring to mind another possible fate, while the crushed paper in Starting Over (2016) suggests that new shores can never truly offer a blank page—trauma leaves scars, whether visible or not.

In the era of President Trump’s Muslim ban, Zarina’s layering of the political and personal feels unavoidable. After all, borders have shaped the artist’s life since the age of ten. “My journey on the dark roads hasn’t ended yet,” said the 80-year-old. The rough outline of a distant horizon in Almost There (2016) speaks to the necessity of pressing onward. As her work navigates the past and the present, she is also mindful to look toward the future.