STPI Annual Special Exhibition | Zarina: Directions to My House 06.06.2026 — 01.08.2026

About The Exhibition

STPI presents Zarina: Directions to My House, a landmark solo exhibition of Zarina (1937–2020, Aligarh, India; New York, United States), one of the most significant printmakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and a key figure in minimalist and diasporic practice.

Curated by New York-based Sarah Burney, independent curator and Zarina’s former studio manager, 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.

Home was a guiding theme for the artist Zarina (1937–2020). Working in a distinctive, restrained visual language, she drew on floor plans, maps, architectural forms, simple geometric shapes, poetry, and language to explore belonging, displacement, and memory through prints, sculptures, and works on paper.

Zarina’s life was shaped by movement. Born in Aligarh, India, she lived in Bangkok, New Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Santa Cruz, and finally New York. Her cosmopolitanism was part wanderlust and part necessity; she eagerly absorbed new languages and cultural zeitgeists but, as a firsthand witness to Partition, remained acutely attuned to exile, migration, and the violence of political borders.

Across a prolific seven-decade career, Zarina transformed histories, geographies, and literary influences into an elegant and affecting visual language. Her work reflects on travel, spirituality, world-making, and loss, while returning again and again to the question of home. Home, for Zarina, was simultaneously personal and political, domestic and cartographic, universal and deeply specific: a building, a poem, and a person; a dynamic, ever-evolving idea and a memory crystallized in the amber of childhood, calling to us across a lifetime.

Seminal works include a series of woodcut prints, Cities I Called Home, 2010, mapping the cities Zarina inhabited across her lifetime, as well as Atlas of My World, 2001, a deeply personal cartography combining maps, Urdu text and poetic references. 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.

For press enquiries, contact communications@stpi.com.sg.

About the STPI Annual Special Exhibition

The STPI Annual Special Exhibition features a highly anticipated exhibition that offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter remarkable printmaking and papermaking explorations of some of the most significant modern and contemporary artists in history.

Specially curated to highlight and foster an appreciation for the artists’ exceptional artistry and innovations in these mediums, each edition echoes STPI’s spirit of collaboration and the bold experimentations that take place in STPI’s workshop.

STPI is proud to have presented the works of many influential artists over the last two decades, including _The Mystery of Picasso’s Creative Process: The Art of Printmaking _(2013), Zao Wou-Ki: No Boundaries (2016), _David Hockney: A Matter of Perspective _(2017),and Takashi Murakami: From Superflat to Bubblewrap (2019).