Lunch & Learn: Zarina’s Dividing Line
A line zigzagging across a piece of paper, a contested border, a festering wound, an unbridgeable ravine: Zarina’s iconic woodcut print Dividing Line (2001) contains a lifetime of history, memory, and dispossession. Join the Fowler and Saloni Mathur, Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA, in welcoming Aparna Kumar, who will discuss the importance of this abstracted landscape in the life and practice of Indian-born, NY-based artist Zarina (1937-2020), and to our understanding of home and belonging. Learn about Zarina’s unique attachment to paper and printmaking, her laborious woodcut carving process, her innovations in cartography, and the intimate relationship of Dividing Line to her experience of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Aparna Kumar is a Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. She received her PhD in Art History at UCLA in 2018. Her research spans modern and contemporary South Asian art, 20th-century partition history, museum studies, and postcolonial theory. Kumar’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Nehru Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. In 2021, her doctoral dissertation, “Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia,” was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize. Saloni Mathur is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA. Her areas of interest include the visual cultures of modern South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, colonial studies and postcolonial criticism, museum studies in a global frame, and modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her most recent book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Duke University Press, 2019), is available online as part of an Open Access initiative at the following link: library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22291. Lunch & Learn The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
