ZARINA

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.

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 will also present 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.