Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-born American artist who turned the historical past of her peripatetic life into an emotional and non secular information composed of spare photographs, poetic phrases and delicate politics, died on April 25 in London. She was 82.

The trigger was problems of Alzheimer’s illness, mentioned Imran Chishti, her nephew.

Ms. Hashmi, who most popular to determine herself professionally by solely her first identify, grew to become internationally recognized for woodcuts and intaglio prints, many combining semiabstract photographs of homes and cities she had lived in accompanied by inscriptions written in Urdu, a language spoken primarily by Muslim South Asians. (It’s the official nationwide language of Pakistan.)

In South Asia itself, she is especially revered as a consultant of a now-vanishing era of artists who have been alive through the 1947 partition of the subcontinent alongside ethnic and non secular strains, a catastrophic occasion that, she felt, minimize her unfastened from her roots and haunted her life and work.

Zarina Rashid was born on July 16, 1937, the youngest of 5 kids, within the small Indian city of Aligarh, the place her father, Sheikh Abdur Rashid, taught at Aligarh Muslim College. Her mom, Fahmida Begum, was a homemaker.

In her 2018 memoir, “Instructions to My Home,” Ms. Hashmi described rising up in what she referred to as a conventional Muslim dwelling. In sizzling months she and her older sister Rani would sleep open air “underneath the celebrities and plot our journeys in life.” The ground plan of her childhood home, whose partitions enclosed a aromatic backyard, grew to become a recurrent presence in her artwork.

That life abruptly ended with the partition of India and the violence between Muslims and Hindus. For security, her father despatched the household to Karachi within the newly shaped Pakistan. The expertise of fleeing to a refugee camp and seeing our bodies left within the highway stayed with Ms. Hashmi.

“These reminiscences shaped how I take into consideration a variety of issues: worry, separation, migration, the individuals you understand, or suppose you understand,” she wrote in her memoir.

She ultimately returned to Aligarh, close to New Delhi, and earned a level in arithmetic from the college there, however the place would by no means be dwelling once more.

At 21 she entered into an organized marriage with a younger international service diplomat, Saad Hashmi, and a lifetime of journey started. In 1958, they have been posted in Bangkok, the place her curiosity in printmaking began. In 1963, after an interlude in New Delhi, the place she made associates within the metropolis’s artwork neighborhood, her husband’s job took them to Paris. She attended the British printmaker William Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17 workshop there, changing into immersed in European modernism, together with abstraction.

Of their 4 years in Paris, she and her husband started to float aside. As soon as again in New Delhi, she basically lived and traveled on her personal. In 1974, she went to Japan, the place she deliberate to remain two weeks; she stayed a 12 months, learning woodblock strategies with Toshi Yoshida in Tokyo.

Throughout this era she experimented with printmaking conventions. She eradicated coloration. She printed grains and textures she discovered on scraps of wooden. She punctured and slashed the floor of handmade paper, or constructed it up sculpturally with pulp.

When her husband died abruptly in 1977, she contemplated settling in India or Pakistan, the place her dad and mom then lived, however selected as a substitute to maneuver to New York Metropolis, which she had visited earlier. She discovered it tough at first, residing a bare-bones life alone in a small loft within the garment district.

“I had little or no cash, was depressed and by no means needed to go away my home,” she wrote. “I felt eaten away.”

However regularly she was absorbed into Manhattan’s downtown artwork world, largely by her involvement with the feminist artwork motion. She taught on the New York Feminist Artwork Institute, which opened in 1979 (and closed in 1990) and joined the Heresies Collective, a gaggle of feminist artists for whom she co-edited the “Third World Girls Artists” subject of their fabled journal.

In 1980 she organized, with Ana Mendieta and Kazuko Miyamoto, an exhibition referred to as “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Girls Artists of the US,” at A.I.R. Gallery, then situated in SoHo. (It’s now within the Dumbo part of Brooklyn.)

It was round this time that she started to make the themes of dwelling and exile central to her artwork. “Some individuals who have come and settled in the US don’t look again, however I’m not one among them,” she mentioned in a 2017 interview with Courtney A. Stewart, a senior analysis assistant within the division of Islamic artwork on the Metropolitan Museum.

Close to-abstract photographs of homes recurred. A 1981 cast-paper aid referred to as “Homecoming” is actually an aerial view of a courtyard surrounded by arches, harking back to the one in her childhood dwelling. A bronze sculpture, “I Went on a Journey III” (1991), is a miniature home on wheels. The prints in a portfolio referred to as “Houses I Made/A Life in 9 Traces” are primarily based on blueprints of homes that Ms. Hashmi had lived in from 1958 onward.

And in a print collection referred to as “Letters From Residence,” Ms. Hashmi overlaid photographs of each home and metropolis onto the texts of letters, usually about household deaths and loss, that her sister Rani had written to her however by no means despatched. Considerably, every letter is transcribed in Urdu script, as are many figuring out labels in different prints. Urdu is slowly going out of forex in sectarian India, however for Ms. Hashmi it outlined “dwelling” as certainly as photographs of maps and homes did.

“The most important loss for me is language,” she instructed Ms. Stewart. “Particularly poetry. Earlier than I’m going to mattress these days, due to YouTube, I take heed to the recitation of poetry in Urdu. I jokingly say I’ve lived a life in translation.”

A lot of the Urdu poetry that Ms. Hashmi cherished was related to Sufism, a mystical pressure of Islam that her deeply. A few of her later summary prints, in addition to sculptures within the type of prayer beads, instantly discuss with it. “I do imagine in a non secular life,” she mentioned, “and I’m not embarrassed by that.”

In 2012, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles organized a profession retrospective, “Zarina: Paper Like Skin,” which traveled to the Guggenheim and the Artwork Institute of Chicago. One other survey, “Zarina: Dark Roads,” was organized by Sarah Burney on the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York College, the place Ms. Hashmi was artist in residence from 2017 to 2018. A 3rd present, “Zarina: Atlas of Her World,” was mounted on the Pulitzer Arts Basis in St. Louis final 12 months.

Ms. Hashmi selected, as an artist, to determine herself by neither her father’s identify nor her husband’s. Along with her nephew, she is survived by a niece, Saima Chishti.

In recent times the political scope of Ms. Hashmi’s work has sharpened, in prints that discuss with anti-Muslim violence and the plight of persecuted refugees. Even then, in its scale and reflective temper, her artwork stays as private and intimate as a diary. Remorse colours the narrative. (“No person is left in our home at Aligarh. Rani is gone. My dad and mom are gone. Residence has turn into one other international place.”) However one thing like serenity settled in.

“I’ve had individuals come to my present and begin to cry,” Ms. Hashmi mentioned in her interview with the Met. “I at all times ask them why, and often they are saying, ‘That’s our story additionally.’ A whole lot of them have been individuals who have been exiles from their very own nation: Holocaust survivors, or individuals who had the need to return dwelling. I understand that when you inform your story and if somebody can come and cry in your shoulder, that’s sharing.”