SINGAPORE.- STPI presents Zarina: Directions to My House, a landmark solo exhibition of Zarina (1937–2020, Aligarh, India; London, United Kingdom), one of the most significant printmakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and a key figure in minimalist and diasporic practice. This show is the largest presentation of Zarina’s works in Southeast Asia.
Curated by New York-based independent curator and Zarina’s former studio manager Sarah Burney, Directions to My House offers a deeply informed perspective on the artist’s life and work. This major exhibition brings together over 50 works from 12 lenders across multiple cities, presenting her practice at a scale not previously seen in Southeast Asia and reflecting her life that was profoundly shaped by numerous continents – having lived across Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Santa Cruz, and finally New York.
Following the presentation of two works in STPI’s inaugural edition of The Print Show and Symposium, Singapore in January 2026, this Annual Special Exhibition delves further into Zarina’s pioneering work with print. As a gallery dedicated to championing print and paper, STPI is distinctly placed to foreground how Zarina’s minimalist vocabulary of line, language and handmade paper redefined what printmaking can hold – formally, politically and emotionally – and to bring this conversation into a Southeast Asian context at a time when questions of home, borders and belonging are pressing. Alongside the exhibition, STPI will also present a series of public programmes inspired by Zarina’s work, including activities centred on collagraphy, cartography, and poetry.
“STPI invites audiences to step inside Zarina’s world, as part of our commitment to spotlighting significant bodies of work by seminal figures in modern and contemporary art, at our 2026 Annual Special Exhibition. Zarina transforms print and paper into sites of memory, mapping, and displacement, resonating strongly with STPI’s dedication to pushing the expressive possibilities of print and paper through experimentation.” – Nathaniel Gaskell, Director of Exhibition Programming & Content Development, STPI
Directions to My House arrives at a moment of sustained momentum and critical attention over the artist’s seven-decade career. The artist has presented major international exhibitions such as Paper Like Skin (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Guggenheim Museum, New York) (25 January – 21 April 2013), and Atlas of Her World (Pulitzer Arts Foundation) (6 September 2019 – 2 February 2020), as well as a body of work currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York as part of the permanent collection. As a significant showcase in Southeast Asia, the exhibition engages with themes of migration, borders, language, and identity, issues that remain deeply relevant and resonate strongly in a region shaped by histories of movement and cultural exchange.
Seminal works include a series of woodcut prints, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999, a series of 36 minimalist woodblock prints that translate Urdu words into abstract visual forms to express themes of home, memory, and displacement; as well as These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib), 2003, a portfolio of nine woodcuts, each an aerial map of geographical borders and contested terrains scarred by political conflict.
The exhibition also presents more recent works such as Rohingyas: Floating on the Dark Sea, 2015, responding to contemporary displacement that extends the artist’s lifelong engagement with exile into urgent global realities; and Letters from Home, 2004, embedding intimate, familial memory into the work through her sister’s handwriting, foregrounding language and correspondence as vessels of connection across distance and time.
Exhibited alongside completed prints, rare insight into Zarina’s artistic development and early experimentation will also be revealed through the exhibition of printing plates, woodblocks, and tools - foregrounding the behind-the-scenes processes behind the artist’s intricate practice and emphasising the act of mark-making – cutting, engraving, incising – as central to her exploration of memory and inscription.
One of the most distinctive printmakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Zarina (1937–2020, Aligarh, India; London, United Kingdom) redefined the medium as a deeply personal and political language of exile, migration and home—particularly for South Asian and diasporic art histories. Working additionally in sculpture and drawing, her work is often associated with the Minimalist movement, characterised by a refined abstraction informed by her early studies in mathematics and architecture.
Reduced to simple geometric forms, Zarina’s stark renderings of maps, borders and architectural layouts carry a profound emotional weight shaped by the trauma and violence of political displacement. Her restrained visual language of line and form—largely monochromatic—recurs across serial works, conveying a proliferation and insistence of shared memory beyond a fixed time and place.
Anchoring Zarina’s practice is her keen attention to language and poetry, where austere compositions are frequently accompanied by elegant Urdu calligraphy. In Home is a Foreign Place (1999), the series of thirty-six woodblock prints are indexed by words rendered in nasta’liq script: “threshold,” “door,” “courtyard,”— articulating ideas of home associated with her mother tongue.
Beyond her expertise in intaglio, woodblock, lithography and silkscreen, Zarina’s later work extends the material possibilities of paper. Through mark-making methods like puncturing, scratching, sewing; and reconstruction by crushing, casting and collaging, the artist captures the transience of belonging, tracing her lifelong journey of making and remaking home.
Zarina obtained her BS in mathematics from Aligarh Muslim University in 1958, and later studied printmaking in Bangkok, Paris and Tokyo. Her work is held in major collections including Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others.
Notable solo exhibitions include A Life in Nine Lines (2021), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Atlas of Her World (2020), Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; and Paper Like Skin (2012–2013), Guggenheim Museum, New York and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her works have also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Urdu Worlds (2026), Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Out of the Ordinary: Uncommon Materials, Marks and Matrices (2025), Hammer Museum, New York, and Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia (2022), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
