Portfolio · 2001
Atlas of My World
Maps become personal territories: places lived, crossed, remembered, and altered by distance rather than neutral diagrams of the world.
Date2001
MediumSix woodcuts with Urdu text on Indian handmade paper
Sheet25½ × 19½ in.
Edition20
Zarina’s atlases do not claim the authority of conventional cartography. Their land masses are cut, darkened, divided, and named through lived experience, allowing political geography to remain inseparable from memory and movement.
The title echoes Adrienne Rich’s Atlas of a Difficult World, but Zarina’s sequence is insistently personal. The United States, Europe, the Arabian Gulf, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Japan form an itinerary of places lived in, passed through, or held at a distance.
The Indian subcontinent appears as a ruptured geography. In conversation, Zarina recalled the Radcliffe Line drawn at Partition; here borders and inscriptions turn political division into an experience of migration, memory, and belonging.
Archive sequence
Individual sheets
The six woodcuts are shown in the order marked by their Roman numerals. Across the sequence, familiar maps are cut, darkened, divided, and remade through memory and movement.