Mapping Otherwise

The global contemporary, as theorized by Hans Belting and Peter Weibel, describes the reconfiguration of art’s geography after 1989—from a Euro-American core to a polycentric world shaped by post–Cold War realignments, migration, and uneven globalization. More than two decades after this reconfiguration, questions of statehood, belonging, and territory gain renewed urgency in the present day. Mapping Otherwise situates the 1947 Partition of South Asia within this broader history of border-making and its afterlives. The line dividing India and Pakistan—drawn amid decolonization—stands as one of many moments when the map’s abstract marks remade lived worlds. The line’s enduring presence, contested and reimagined, carries metaphorical force far beyond the subcontinent: it crystallizes how modern statehood is founded on both separation and longing. Through their respective work, artists Zarina Hashmi (b. Aligarh, India, 1937–2020) and Naiza Khan (b. Bahawalpur, Pakistan, 1968) explore what it means to inhabit and reimagine those lines. Turning to the map as a visual instrument of power and imagination, the artists trace what official cartographies conceal: memories of displacement, longing, and reattachment. Their works evoke spatial imaginaries that exceed the nation-state, proposing forms of connection and re-existence within the very structures that divide. They activate the map as a means of reckoning with partitioned trauma: of translating political rupture into material form, and recovering the intimacies obscured by official cartographies. Together, the two artists’ practices enter a quiet dialogue between abstraction and materiality, memory and mapping, to trace how histories of division persist across the geopolitical and the intimate, and negotiate how art can transform cartography into a language of remembrance, reconciliation, and repair.

What to expect:
Mixed media, Film / Video, Painting