COLLECTION NAME:
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
mediaCollectionId
ArtArtHiAAH~7~7
Visual Resources Teaching Collection
Collection
true
Image Record ID:
aahi0001239
image_record_id
aahi0001239
Image Record ID
false
Work Title (display):
Apparatus of Power
Image Title:
full view
Work Dates (display):
1995
Work Dates type:
creation
Image Date (display):
2008-02-18
Work Creator (display):
Shahzia Sikander (Pakistani-American, born 1969)
Work Creator gender:
female
work_creator_or_agent_gender
female
Work Creator gender
false
Work Creator notes (display):
Pakistani painter, active also in the USA. Sikander's formative influences were her liberal family, schooling at a Catholic convent and travelling throughout Pakistan. She attended the National College of Arts in Lahore in 198992, followed by the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 19925. Sikander is an example of a transnational artist, whose evolving artistic expression kept pace with her own development as a political individual. With a precocious gift for drawing (see fig.), she showed great versatility in her artistic media, from delicate miniatures and drawings inspired by numerology, to large-scale wall paintings, installations, performance art (with the dancer Sharmila Desai), digital animation and ceramics (see fig.). At the art school in Lahore she demonstrated her independence by specializing in miniature painting, widely dismissed at the time as kitsch, though some younger artists in Pakistan have subsequently followed her path. This solid grounding in traditional craftsmanship paradoxically offered her the wherewithal to engage with the predicament of modernity and its fractured identities. The genre opened up a dialogue between artistic, cultural and existential polarities: East and West, Muslim and Hindu, secular Mughal portraiture and Hindu religious mythology, narration and abstraction. Sikander used her delicate skills to destabilize the interface of tradition and modernity, using formalist devices to complicate the miniature's precious surface. In her painting Perilous Order (1997; New York, Whitney), she overpainted the portrait of a friend in the Mughal manner with erotic figures of gopis, companions of the god Krishna. She also covered the surface with dots in a minimalist vein and placed in the lower centre a woman who draws nourishment from the roots that take the place of her feet. These different layers work simultaneously in slight opposition to each other: exquisite craftsmanship vying with abstraction, while cultural memories crowd the picture in a play of affirmation and denial. Her technique of heterogeneous layering, which resists a singular reading of her work, has prompted a wide range of interpretations, notably locating her work in post-colonial hybridity within a growing global diaspora. Sikander's playful gopis and Hindu goddesses address women's view of their own spirituality as well as gender and power hierarchies. The Islamic scholar Faisal Devji compares her figurative imagination with Urdu erotic songs, called the ghazal, to bring out the tensions between word and image, and between style and iconography in Islam. Her erotic imagery suggests mutual exoticization by Muslims and Hindus in South Asia, intimately connected by history and culture, and yet locked in mutual suspicion and ill-will. Her explorations of multiple levels of meaningmetaphorical, narrative and abstractin her use of layers of imagery are further developed in her video installations. In SpiNN (2003), for instance, she went through the process of digitally scaning an initial drawing that was then subjected to repeated overdrawing and scanning. These images were then linked together to produce an animation (see fig.). Not only in these computer animations, but also in the translucent overlapping screens of installations such as the Chaman series, the semi-transparent layers of her paintings, or in her constant metamorphosis of motifs, such as the hair of the gopis in a Basohli-style miniature that turns into a vortex of blackbirds, she constantly seeks to both reveal and to conceal the originary motifs. The creative process itself highlights her elliptical and essentially post-modern and political deconstructions of the meaning of an image. She shares with the avant-garde a concern for chance and accident, for Freudian ambiguity, indeterminacy and open-endedness. She lets the shapes and forms emerge out of her initial idea, preferring the process to the final product, which is why her work does not fit into any rigid category. Her early miniatures were the starting point of her protean forms, but in her later works, such as her landscapes, this element has become more muted (see fig.). Because of the complexity of her development and her ability to constantly engage with the new, she has been variously claimed for exoticism, post-colonial hybridity and feminism, but in the final analysis she belongs to the emerging generation of cosmopolitan artists in the early 21st century. Sikander held several major residencies and exhibited widely in the USA, Europe and Asia. In 2000 she produced the large banner entitled Maligned Monsters, as part of the installation Project 70 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2006 MOMA invited her to participate in the group show, Without Boundary, consisting mainly of artists of Islamic origin. She participated in biennales in Istanbul and Seville among a number of international shows. (Grove Art Online Accessed 2008-02-06)
Work Creator UCB affiliation (display):
visiting artist, Visiting Artist Program, 2007
Work Style Period:
20th century
work_styleperiod
20th century
Work Style Period
false
Work Style Period:
Contemporary
work_styleperiod
Contemporary
Work Style Period
false
Work Subject:
miniature painting, Indic
subject
miniature painting, Indic
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
women (female humans)
subject
women (female humans)
Work Subject
false
Work Subject:
figures
subject
figures
Work Subject
false
Work Worktype:
paintings (visual works)
work_type
paintings (visual works)
Work Worktype
false
Work Category (VRC classification):
paintings
work_category__ucbaahvrc_classification_
paintings
Work Category (VRC classification)
false
Work Material and Technique (display):
watercolor and paint on paper
Work Measurements (display):
9 in (H) x 6 in (W)
Work Location (Repository or Site) name:
Carol S. Crawford Collection
Work Location (Repository or Site) role:
repository
Image Rights (display):
unknown
Image Rights fair use checklist:
1) use of this image is for education and educational research; 2) access is restricted to University of Colorado and Auraria Higher Education Center communities; 3) the original photographer is credited if known; 4) the image is published; 5) the amount of the work in relation to the whole is needed for education or educational research; 6) the number of derivatives is the minimum required for education or educational research; 7) the image has not been found to be reasonably available for sale; 8) duplication of the image does not violate preexisting contracts.
Work Rights (display):
© Shahzia Sikander
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Holding Institution:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Collection:
Art and Art History Visual Resources Center
Collection info and contact:
For information about this collection, see