Shahzia Sikander: Nemesis
Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY
January 31 – April 11, 2004
The ancient art of miniature painting boldly enters the 21st century in the work of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander. The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents her innovative blend of Persian and contemporary themes, exquisitely rendered in small scale and opulent color in Shahzia Sikander: Nemesis.
Trained in miniature painting in Pakistan, Shahzia Sikander freely mingles Hindu and Muslim painting techniques with contemporary Western elements, from American painting and pop culture to war, supermodels, and fairy tales. Asian Art News described her work as “cultural weaving…fusing centuries-old techniques and images with provocative contemporary forms, without losing the rich possibilities of either approach.”
Sixth in the Tang’s series of “Openers” designed to introduce artists and new work to the region, Nemesis showcases the varied media and styles of Sikander’s most recent works. They range from jewel-like paintings as small as 6 by 8 inches to the large-scale wall installation Sikander makes in the Tang’s atrium. The exhibition also features two new works of animation, a medium whose elements of motion and time expand the narrative quality of Sikander’s works and invite the viewer to further engage her characters and environments. “The animations make more obvious the complex layering of imagery that the artist has always pursued in her paintings,” said exhibition co-curator Jessica Hough, associate curator of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.
The exhibition’s title comes from Sikander’s animation Nemesis, in which an elephant is composed, piece by piece, of smaller animals both gentle and fierce. Ridden by a devil character, the composite creature can be described as a nemesis—an unconquerable foe. Nemesis was also the name of the ancient Greek goddess of divine retribution, and “Greek gods, like Indian gods—even those thought of as ‘good’—are capable of imposing severe punishments on their subjects,” said exhibition co-curator Ian Berry, curator of the Tang Museum. “Sikander’s works often highlight this dark side of fate.”
Many of the works at first glance resemble ancient miniatures—but only at first glance. For instance, the 8-by-11-inch SpiNN (2003) depicts a spacious Mughal throne room rich with delicate architectural details (carvings, columns, geometric tiles) and crammed with nearly sixty gopis, female attendants of the Hindu god Krishna. Here, however, the exotic ladies dance attendance on a classically Western figure of Justice, seated on a throne and holding her scales aloft. Sikander’s work is “hardly about adhering to a closed heritage,” said the New York Times. “Instead, it seems to invite previously unrelated pictorial strains to mingle with humor, irony, and often eroticism.”
Born in the multicultural city of Lahore, Pakistan, Shahzia Sikander grew up equally conversant with international pop culture and her country’s heritage of miniature painting. Highly detailed and stylized, the art form originated as a courtly embellishment for royal manuscripts and reached its height during the Mughal empire (1526-1857), when Muslim rulers of Persia reigned over predominantly Hindu India. By Sikander’s day, cliché miniature images were “abundant as gift items everywhere, saturating the tourist market,” she recalls. “My initial feeling …was that it was kitsch, but I saw the potential of subversion.”
Shahzia Sikander studied miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where classmates concentrating in contemporary Western art warned her that pursuing so highly stylized an art form would surely stifle her creativity. Inspired by the dedication of the school’s one instructor of miniature painting (his students were assigned to catch baby squirrels to acquire hairs fine enough for their handmade brushes), Sikander fully embraced “the rigors required of a miniaturist,” as Pakistan Newsline wrote. These included “the ritualized fabrication of brushes, the preparation of paper and of pigment from vegetable dyes as well as the meticulous brushwork required to achieve both the sharpness and softness of miniature painting techniques.” To Shahzia Sikander, the rigorous apprenticeship “never seemed restrictive. I wanted to learn the technique and skills,” and, she adds, “I liked that tension, remaining free of being prescribed while using a very prescribed art form.”
During graduate and post-graduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design and Houston’s Glassell School of Art, Shahzia Sikander discovered Southeast Asian painting styles that, given the highly charged political relationship between Pakistan and India, had previously been unavailable to her. Into her own Pakistani-based Mughal style, she began to incorporate the sensual designs and vibrant colors of the Indian Rajput school and the woman-centered format that first emerged in India’s Kangra valley in the 18th century.
Sikander’s debut onto the New York art scene in 1997 quickly won attention and acclaim. Her work has appeared at the Drawing Center, the 1997 Whitney Biennial, Deitch Projects in SoHo, and the Museum of Modern Art’s important 2002 exhibition Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, among other venues. Her honors and awards include the honorary artist award from the Pakistan Ministry of Culture and National Council of the Arts. Shahzia Sikander lives and works in New York City.
The exhibition is organized by Tang curator Ian Berry and Aldrich associate curator Jessica Hough in collaboration with the artist.
The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
