Some wounds never heal. Some might even find temporary relief from scratching away at open gashes, as if this redresses the pain. Such is the case of Zarina Hashmi, who chisels away at blocks for her woodcut prints and cuts away at paper for her collages, all the while attempting to remediate the silence that surrounds both personal and collective traumas of the past, particularly in relation to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.

This endeavor for respite from feelings of pain and suffering could be intuited throughout the artist’s exhibition “Weaving Darkness and Silence” at Gallery Espace. Zarina’s practice has always been an attempt to transgress the limits of language in representing memory, exile and social cataclysms. In the never-before-exhibited woodcut prints, etchings and collages on display, she further withdraws into a particular quality of these notions—the repressed presence of these topics from everyday consciousness, with varying forms of darkness as metaphors for it. For instance, the penetrating loneliness of the night is laid out in parallel vertical black lines in Silent Night (2017), which carve out negative spaces against a ground of white paper.

Paper for Zarina is like skin—malleable and susceptible to aging. As a consequence, her intimate treatment of the material takes on visceral qualities, bringing to mind the physicality of her aging body, and the melding of body and emotional suffering. In works such as Untitled (2017), archways from the artist’s childhood home in Aligarh—to which she never had the opportunity to return—are cut out from handmade paper, crushed to depict the texture of aging skin, in turn suggestive of a haunting memory that is perhaps inscribed on her body. In a series of untitled collages from 2017, made from etchings on handmade paper, a similar texture is visible, indicating more indelible loss.