CINCINNATI and CLEVELAND — Final 12 months, Shahzia Sikander created a trio of complementary works for her touring profession survey Collective Habits, at present on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum and Cleveland Museum of Artwork. “Gendered Currents: Gopi Regatta,” “Ode to Venice,” and “Procession” — a graphite drawing, intaglio print, and mixed-media collage, respectively — all depict a gaggle of feminine figures on a gondola, a reference to the present’s debut on the Venice Biennale final 12 months. On the bow is the bust of a lady with braids formed into horn-like spirals, echoing the water’s currents, the boat’s oars, and the artist’s 2023 public sculptures in New York and Houston — the latter of which was notoriously vandalized final July.
The figures within the gondola, because the drawing clarifies, are gopis, feminine cowherds dedicated to the Hindu god Krishna and recurring presences in Sikander’s artwork. In Hindu theology, they exist as embodiments of selfless love for the singular god. Sikander first gave them their very own narrative along with her mixed-media drawing “Gopi Crisis” (2001). The composition depicts a cluster of the ladies surrounded by giant, amorphous grey types, circles of radiating dots, and what appears at first like a swarm of birds, however is definitely the gopis’ hair flying off their heads in what is likely to be thought of an act of managed chaos.
The elegant piece directly facilities and disperses the picture of the non-White, non-Western girl. Its fashion displays the custom of Indo-Persian miniature portray that the Pakistan-born artist studied on the Nationwide School of Arts in Lahore within the late Nineteen Nineties, at a time when most college students had been targeted on trendy and avant-garde artwork, and the “neo-miniature” style she subsequently pioneered. “As a young artist,” she mentioned in dialog with Hyperallergic, “I [wanted to] study pictorial traditions that have an uneasy relationship with Western art history.”
Shahzia Sikander, “Study for the Scroll” (1988), collage on paper connected to board; Assortment of the Artist (© Shahzia Sikander; picture courtesy Shahzia Sikander and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles)
Sikander subverted the artwork kind by redefining the miniature by way of the lens of feminism. But in the USA, the place she has lived since 1993, the “crisis” was, and nonetheless is, not simply considered one of decentering patriarchal energy. South and West Asian girls have occupied a nebulous place in conversations about racial id right here. In 2001, this discourse grew to become much more fraught because the US authorities and media villainized Brown and Muslim individuals within the “war on terror.”
On this mild, the swarm of gopis, immune to narrative cohesion or clear racial definition, their femininity uncontained but marked as different, was doubly or triply transgressive. In the present day, neoliberal globalism has cleared a path for white supremacy to rear its head once more; the world is probably no safer for the gopis, or Brown and Muslim girls, than it was in 2001 — and the US is an particularly precarious dwelling. Within the 2024 trio of works, nonetheless, the figures are calm and guaranteed. Touring throughout water — an entity that’s, by its nature, ever-changing — they chart their very own course on their very own vessel, however embrace the flux. Likewise, the female, by its nature, is fluid within the face of limitations.
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum. Left: “Liquid Light II” (2024); far proper: “Infinite Woman” (2019–21) (picture by Phil Armstrong)
Collectively, the gopis from 2001 and 2024 outline a lady as a social topic pushing again towards marginalization or erasure, a disruptive female vitality, and a movement that transcends and circumvents limitations. These themes recur all through the Cincinnati Artwork Museum’s expanded model of Collective Habits, curated by Ainsley M. Cameron, and an related exhibition on the Cleveland Museum of Artwork, curated by Emily Liebert. Likewise, these features of womanhood — the fact of the female-identifying social topic and the fluid pressure of the “feminine” — interweave with Sikander’s explorations of colonialism, feminism, and world politics which have knowledgeable her artwork and life for greater than three a long time.
In an interview within the Collective Habits catalog, Sikander asks if a picture can “refuse fixity.” Close to the start of the exhibition are two early works: her undergraduate thesis venture, “The Scroll” (1989–90), and a examine for it. Increasing the flattened areas typical of miniature portray throughout greater than 5 toes, “The Scroll” depicts a diaphanous younger girl weaving by way of her household dwelling in Pakistan, lastly reaching a canvas the place she paints a self-portrait.
Shahzia Sikander, “The Scroll” (1989–90), vegetable coloration, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper; Assortment of the Artist (© Shahzia Sikander; picture courtesy Shahzia Sikander and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles)
The portray, which was foundational to the neo-miniature style, is endlessly compelling, not least because of what the artist calls the “displacement of scale” — the not possible unfolding of structure and the determine’s dreamlike motion by way of it, which collectively create a way that the work takes place throughout each house and time. Inside this realm, the younger girl is “claiming … the freedom of the body,” as Sikander says in a video in regards to the portray, unconstrained by the legal guidelines of physics — and the legal guidelines of these in energy. The work was partly a response to the Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan beneath the army dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, which severely restricted girls’s rights. The vertical examine is much more dizzying in its dislocation of time and house. Its repeated patterns and figures create a vertiginous visible cacophony that disallows the attention to settle, underscoring the convergence of imaginative and prescient and motion and foreshadowing Sikander’s later animations and mosaics.
Although the narrative of female spatial-social transgression is extra evident in “The Scroll” than within the examine, each illuminate the political critique embedded all through the 2 exhibitions. Displacing scale and “defying bodily restrictions,” in her phrases, are imaginative acts that rupture repressive patriarchal and colonial narratives. The Cincinnati present establishes this place earlier than guests even enter. A golden sculpture of a lady, similar to at least one beforehand put in on the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse’s rooftop, and much like a recurring female determine in her artwork, hovers atop a pink lotus flower outdoors of the galleries. She wears a jabot that refers to American Supreme Courtroom Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whereas the lotus, typically showing in Hindu iconography as a pedestal for deities, symbolizes knowledge.
Shahzia Sikander, “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation” (1993), gouache and gesso on board; Cincinnati Artwork Museum (© Shahzia Sikander)
A small gouache and gesso portray, “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation” (1993), depicts a golden-yellow determine with breasts, rounded hips, and tendril-like legs and arms floating in an undefined black house — just like the sculpture, however headless. In a catalog essay for Sikander’s 2022 exhibition Extraordinary Realities on the Museum of Effective Arts, Houston, Gayatri Gopinath writes that the silhouette “de-essentializes the female figure by blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman, plant and animal.” The determine additionally de-essentializes gender itself and, in doing so, occupies a femme house with out acquiescing to the sociopolitical constraints of womanhood or ossifying into what we would think about as a sexed, embodied human particular person. This similar determine emerges repeatedly in Sikander’s work, and it’s been thought of in each constructive and unfavorable phrases (the tendrils recall roots; the headlessness evokes violence). Each readings can coexist, but it surely appears possible that somebody or one thing has damage this being as a result of historical past is a report of brutality towards noncompliant girls.
Within the a lot bigger acrylic portray “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II” (2000–2001), the determine has gained a number of arms that wield numerous weapons, a reference to the Hindu warrior goddess Durga. If the sooner one appeared indifferent and evasive, this one, now a watery orange-red towards a beige floor, seems prepared for a battle.
The work lays naked connections throughout historical past and mythology between girls and monstrosity which have lengthy fascinated the artist. Sikander opened a 2021 editorial for the New York Occasions by saying, “Being Asian-American — or Asian-anything — in the West often means living the paradox of being invisible while standing out.” The monstrous and grotesque female exists inside this slippery cycle of hyper-visibility and erasure, however right here, they change into sources of power, and proposals for ladies — notably girls of coloration — within the US to harness their powers of navigation.
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum (picture by Phil Armstrong)
The layering of mythology, historical past, and up to date feminism are poetically condensed within the sculptural version “Promiscuous Intimacies” (2020), on view in Cincinnati and Cleveland. The bronze work depicts an Indian Devata perched atop a Greco-Roman Venus, the 2 girls entwined in a sensual embrace. The work brings queer want into an art-historical sphere that excludes males; Sikander described it as “evok[ing] non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as foreign and inauthentic” whereas “disrupting taken-for-granted national, temporal, and art historical boundaries.” The fluidity of female vitality within the artist’s work additionally opens up the opportunity of the ladies as reflections of each other and, by extension, of their very own multivalence.
In Cleveland, a smaller presentation brings Sikander’s relationship with historic artwork into focus by pairing her works with items from the museum’s South Asian assortment. Her giant mosaic, “Touchstone” (2021), is put in subsequent to the portray “Uprooted Order” (1997), portraying two floating femme figures in a vertical embrace that remembers “Promiscuous Intimacies,” and a historic miniature portray attributed to Bishandas, “Nur Jahan holding a portrait of Emperor Jahangir” (c. 1627). Within the Seventeenth-century work, Nur Jahan, the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s favourite spouse, who dealt with most state affairs, holds a portrait of him after his demise; the portray could have symbolized her want to stay in energy. “Touchstone” reveals an Indian girl in an identical composition trying to carry a chalawa (a ghost or spirit). The connection between the intangible spirit and the self is refracted by way of the sensible play of glass shards and light-weight; right here, the lady herself turns into intangible and infinite.
Close by is an 18th-century portray, “The Goddess Vajreshwari and Female attendants Boating in a Crimson Sea” (India, c. 1700–1725), hung subsequent to “Ode to Venice,” one of many three photographs that opened this essay. The ladies within the earlier work could have charted a path that made manner for Sikander’s portray, however by putting them collectively, the centuries collapse. What emerges is a continuum. The more durable it’s to see past the limitations of the second, the extra pressing Sikander’s artwork, and its radically transgressive female, turns into.
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cleveland Museum of Artwork. Far left: “Ode to Venice” (2024); middle: “Promiscuous Intimacies” (2020); proper: “Touchstone” (2021) (picture by Phil Armstrong)
Shahzia Sikander, “Cholee Kay Peechay Kiya? Chunree Kay Neechay Kiya? (What is under the Blouse? What is under the Dress?)” (1997), vegetable coloration, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper; Hessel Museum of Artwork, Heart for Curatorial Research, Bard School (© Shahzia Sikander)
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum. Pictured: Portrait of the Artist collection (2016), etchings with accompanying textual content by Ayad Akhtar (picture by Phil Armstrong)
Shahzia Sikander, “Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off” (1998), collage with vegetable coloration, dry pigment, watercolor, graphite, and tea on wasli paper; Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg (© Shahzia Sikander)
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cleveland Museum of Artwork. Heart: “Arose” (2020), glass mosaic (picture by Phil Armstrong)
Shahzia Sikander, “Her-Vimana” (2024), combined media collage; Assortment of the Artist (© Shahzia Sikander; picture courtesy Shahzia Sikander and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles)
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum, with “Parallax” (2013), 3-channel, single-image HD digital animation with 5.1 encompass sound, 15:26 minutes., music rating and sound design by Du Yun, animation by Patrick O’Rourke (picture by Phil Armstrong)
Set up view of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Habits on the Cincinnati Artwork Museum. Pictured on proper: “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II” (2000–2001) (picture by Phil Armstrong)
