Portfolio · 2003
Countries
Five contested geographies are carved as maps, borders, and fields of memory.
Date2003
MediumFive woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black on Okawara paper and mounted on Somerset paper
Sheet16 × 14 in.
Edition20 with two artist’s proofs
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.
Archive sequence
Individual sheets
The sequence moves from Chechnya through Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan to Holy Land, where the map gives way to a stark vertical form.