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I have been scratching my head for a while to find a word to describe the contemporary art scene. The only word I could come up with, inadequate as it might be, is frenzy. The capital has been invaded by an army of “new” or born-again artists. Retired bureaucrats, bored professionals, the jobless and everybody’s second cousin seem to be holding art exhibitions — one of mine (second cousin that is) who didn’t until recently know the difference between water colours and oils just did. And, dealers, jumpstart curators, and gallerists seem to be popping up like wild mushrooms.

It’s not just art for art’s sake: many believe that being an artist or an artist’s Svengali, will get you that much closer to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I don’t quite blame these arrivistes in the world of art. After all, as the recent Saffronart auction reaffirmed, the lucky ones are competing with Bollywood stars. The Shah Rukh Khans and Hrithik Roshans of the art world are SH Raza and Tyeb Mehta: while Raza’s Climat went for Rs6 crore, Mehta’s Rickshawpuller pulled in almost Rs5 crore. What may have added more glitter to that pot of gold is the fact that, increasingly, buyers are homegrown desis, domiciled in India —no longer the poorer cousins of the NRIs.

The buzz about art may never have been as loud, the social cachet of being an artist a quick passage to Page 3. However, there’s a downside to the buoyancy of the art mart. What is really on show are cleavages and leggy lasses and studs with gelled or spiked hair, and almost always some vague gora or a diplomatic envoy with nothing better to do. In all the frenzy of air kisses, clinking wine glasses and fashionistas gracing art shows, does anybody really look at what’s on the wall? Most of the time paintings end up as wallflowers — mere backdrops to the networking going on.

So, when there’s a show that is the real McCoy — work that is true to the artist’s own evolution and rasion d’etre and not just instantly whipped up and designed to appeal to current bestselling trends — it’s like a breath of fresh air. In fact, it takes your breath away. New York-based artist Zarina’s two shows concurrently on in Delhiand Mumbai did just that.

Together the two exhibitions comprise a visual autobiography of the artist,constructed with her personal hieroglyphics — her own alphabets as it were. As sheeloquently puts it: “It’s my life.” Her work is minimalist, pristine — with the formality of the finest calligraphy. Lines and geometric forms make up her prints and cast-paper sculptures.

But they all tell stories, as music notes make music. And they encompass, equally, her personal and social, and often political concerns.

Homelessness is a major theme — migrations, destroyed cities, divisive and corrosive borders. Zarina is an Indian living in New York, and her family is in Pakistan. Houses and the extensions of houses (gardens, plants, courtyards, and floor plans) figure repeatedly in her work. Home for Zarina (now 70) has for the last 36 years been a Manhattan loft in the fur district of the island, and she’s been navigating the outside world with her books and the internet. But a sense of home and life is increasingly elsewhere — in a kind of memoryscape shared with loved ones. Unfailingly, in her prints and paper sculptures she keeps returning to the house in Aligarh where she grew up. A place in the mind where her parents and loved ones can all congregate, where the shared moments of the past find a home in the present.

Her overarching theme of homelessness, so poignantly pertinent to our times, also includes in its sweep bombed and devastated cities. Her litany of tragedy includes Sarajevo, Ahmedabad, Grozny, Kabul, Baghdad and Groznyy — even New York, post 9/11, manifest in two white vertical lines on black.

Several decades ago Zarina read something about the dead living alongside the dead — that pearls are the tears of the sea. These lines came back just now when she was asked to create a work for Sahmat for their theme of the history of Partition. “I wanted to make a dividing line. I went to the bazaar in Old Delhi and bought fake pearls — tear drops — and thought of hanging it with a fish line from the ceiling or the wall. For me it’s a river of tears. Partition shattered lives. I feel that I also got lost in the shuffle. All my family is in Pakistan; I am an Indian and live in New York.”

Home in the end is probably a state of mind for her.

Email:jain_madhu@hotmail.com