Fully acknowledged for the first time for her contribution to American art when her work appeared at the Drawing Centre and the Whitney Biennial in 1997, Shahzia Sikander has consistently and intentionally resisted classification. Grounding her work in the writings of Michel Foucault, Helene Cixous and Edward Said, she communicates a deep suspicion of binary oppositions, always seeking a “third space” outside of them.
By a quirk of fate this critic always missed seeing Shahzia’s works in New York. How fascinated one was to see two towering works at ARTHK 10. At best, the American-Pakistani artist Shazia Sikander’s works are known for “merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media”.
One large piece, based on Persian miniatures and priced at $125,000, sold to a private collector, and a $300,000 multi-panel work was claimed for review by a museum acquisition committee. It came as no surprise when Shahzia was awarded he SCMP Art Fortunes Award at the art fair. Spectacular and deeply arresting, it is her ability to fast forward the traditional miniature format into contemporary lingua franca that sets her work apart. Brought into the fair by the Pilar Corrias Gallery, the singular work, mammoth in terms of effect and essence depicted layers of illustrative and abstract imagery coating the surfaces of her two pages from a book. The book as a metaphor says many things for a minitaure artist —specifically because miniatures only got a life in the pages of a book. But this work trapped your gaze, it possessed you like nothing ever did. It reflected the sublime and the distilled simultaneously. Calligraphic script spread like a veiled trellis even as she named the work I Am Also Not My Own Enemy. Combining elements of textural collage with digital imaging techniques, and layering images from a staggering number of sources, her work remains in constant flux.
Open-ended narratives embedded in each layer, traverse a reflection of multi-faceted and constantly morphing relationships. Her appropriation of imagery from her own visual vocabulary and universal modern motifs, results in a brilliant understanding and decoding of abstracted symbols from her previous works. Her intent is to beguile the viewer from making literal interpretations. Sikander creates a deeply emotive, evocative and visceral experience of the power of symbolism in artistic interpretation. Raised in Lahore, she explores the thresholds of Hindu and Islamic culture often combining tropes and iconography from both. Through the addition of modern and non-traditional elements to the manuscript artform, Sikander forces the viewer to reconcile conflicting sensibilities hidden within beautifully rendered landscapes.
“...Traditionally, visual art has been a culturally reductive form of human expression, whereby communities, tribes, cities and countries have defined their identity. We have been quick to label art as ‘eastern or western’, ‘indigenous or foreign’, ‘Christian or Islamic’, and so the list goes on as galleries define their areas of specialty. However, artists such as Shahzia Sikander are transcending such categorisations and resent being exoticised as simply Asian or Pakistani.”
Her felicity in rendering icons as open-ended narratives becomes her leitmotif. Symbolism gets abstracted and contextual associations are removed to unravel a rich tapestry of metaphoric moorings. Cross-cultural images — such as sports equipment, animals, landscape and pattern — incongruously coexist alongside traditional Asian motifs organized in swirling and tumbling compositions. Men’s faces float around the boarder of the “text” as mountains of land grow in place of their wind-swept headdresses. Intriguing however is the manner in which she presents the dictums of identity as “fluid and unfixed,” and oppositions such as “west/east, white/black, white/brown, modern/tradition, presence/absence, begin-ning/end, and consci-ous/unconscious” are questioned in an eternal dialogue with tradition. What arrests is her visual vocabulary — it re-introduces disparate deep-rooted allegories and illustrates them as an abstracted, shared, indeterminate and simultaneously dissolving and evolving story.
According to the artist, the result of her residency and collaboration with FWM at Philadelphia was “a successful marriage of two materials” that had previously been independent in her work, and an important exploration of scale. Inspired by traditional manuscript form, the centerpiece for the exhibition measuring approximately 80 x 60 inches (framed) consists of two elaborately embellished prints. Adorned with gold leaf and gouache hand painting over silk screened pigment, The Illustrated Page Series #1 (2005-6) is the first of three unique works on paper in the same named series made in collaboration with FWM. Both “pages” display intricate landscape imagery and large surfaces of color and pattern. By utilising the process of silkscreen printing in conjunction with gouache hand painting, Sikander magnified the imagery and vocabulary of the work for which she is well known.
Precision of line and delicacy of touch conjoin to create contemporary interpretation. Sikander is an artist with a deep sensitivity and steps out of her web to reach the underprivileged. Dr Salim Ali notes that she visited Pakistan few winters ago to find ways by which an art economy could help the victims of the Kashmir earthquake. She has helped a small Afghan artist collective reap the fruits of globalisation by selling village art to galleries worldwide and hopes to do the same for some of the earthquake affected areas. Only after standing in front of her work,every day of five days could one truly understand the depth of her quest and the genius of the humane entity which drives her to create crucibles of calligraphic character. At Art Hong Kong, two works by Shazia became the essence of an epic.