Roots and Wings - How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist

"Art is how we learn to tell stories about our truths and how we negotiate a place in the world for future generations." Shahzia Sikander

How a Children’s Book about Art Took Flight

The artist, the author, and the illustrator behind Roots and Wings: 

How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist, share the story of its making.

Hanna Barczyk, Amy Novesky, Shahzia Sikander

Source: MOMA

The cover of Roots and Wings

On the occasion of Children’s Book Week, we asked the team who made the newly published Roots and Wings to share some behind-the-scenes insights into how it came about.

How did you all come to work together on this project?

Shahzia Sikander: I was invited five years ago by MoMA. I had a young child who loved to paint and I thought it would be so cool for him to read a book about his mother. I also loved the children’s books produced by MoMA on Jacob Lawrence, Sonia Delauney, and Yayoi Kusama. I met Hanna through MoMA and she did some sketches and I fell in love with the cover image capturing the spirit of the young girl painting and riding the benevolent and wise simurgh, a Persian mythical bird, the gesture symbolic of harnessing imagination and intellect. Initially I was asked to write the text for the book myself. It was a learning curve. I realized writing for young kids is best in the hands of a children’s author so when the project got picked up again with Amy I was thrilled. I loved that she had written about my favorite female artists: Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Hanna Barczyk: In 2016, I received a request to be one of the illustrators to create a few sample illustrations for a possible picture book about Shahzia Sikander. I am happy to say that I was the artist chosen to illustrate the book. That summer, I had a chance to meet with Shahzia in her Times Square studio and began the process of collecting pictures and images. Shahzia showed me a few books to look at, which included The Adventures of Hamza. She introduced me to the fables of Kalila and Demna and writer Korney Chukovsky, and shared stories of her life growing up in Pakistan. She took me through her studio and showed me animations and drawings that she was currently working on. Storyboard sketches followed with a rough idea on planning out the book. A few months later, however, the book was put on hold. In December 2019, I received the news that Roots and Wings was back on. I was thrilled to be reunited with Shahzia to continue our journey to bring the original and new sketches to life.

Amy Novesky: Abrams, who distributes MoMA’s books, recommended me to MoMA when they were looking for someone to cowrite Shahzia’s story. Abrams published two of my picture books about artists: Me, Frida (about Frida Kahlo) and Cloth Lullaby (about Louise Bourgeois). I am both a children’s book author and an editor—currently I am the children’s book editorial director for Cameron Kids, a division of Abrams. It’s a small world!

Illustration from Roots and Wings

BANI ABIDI: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared - MCA Chicago

 

Sep 4, 2021 – Jun 5, 2022 @ MCA Chicago

About

In Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi (b. 1971, lives and works in Karachi and Berlin) critiques those who hold power—and the many ways they wield it. Abidi is a master storyteller, using humor and absurdism to take on issues of militarism and nationalism as well as memory, belonging, and self-determination. Like an archaeologist of urban life, Abidi intermingles fact with fiction in stories that navigate the intersection of personal and political drama. This major survey, developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, explores more than two decades of Abidi’s practice and features video, photography, sound installations, and new work, as well as work from the MCA Collection.

The MCA presentation is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation; Natasha Ginwala, Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin; and Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Curators’ note

Pakistani artist Bani Abidi (b. 1971, lives and works in Karachi and Berlin) lampoons the languages of power and their diverse manifestations in nationalism, militarization, state surveillance, and gender norms. Featuring formative video, photography, and sound works as well as new commissions, this major survey explores the artist’s practice over two decades and includes work from the MCA Collection. Playing the role of a storyteller and urban archaeologist, Abidi delves into an emotional and psychological space of satire, absurdity, and social commentary. In this exhibition developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, the artist’s works are imbued with personal and communal narratives impacted by current geopolitical relations between India and Pakistan, the historical power struggles of South Asia, and the local impact of interventionist American operations in the wider region. From the specific social and political context of Pakistan, she wrestles with the collective amnesia of a cosmopolitan promise that has been erased by nativist populism as well as ideological and sectarian nationalism that also encroaches upon struggles for justice around the world.

The artist performs to the camera in her earliest video works made while she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. These role-plays that figure Indian and Pakistani protagonists mine the history and current political tensions between the two neighboring states through whimsical, comparative analysis of food, music, and news media. These works manifest divisions within the popular imagination, while revealing deep affinities that transgress borders. In later works, disciplined and defiant bodies confront visible and invisible spectrums of power. Everyday life must navigate immigration protocol, road closures, and taxonomies of security barricades. The dramaturgy that animates much of Abidi’s work blurs the distinction between screen time and real time, actors and non-actors, scripted and spontaneous moments.

For this exhibition, Abidi expanded the watercolor series The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared (2019–ongoing) that engages with the memory of writers, political leaders, and bloggers across Pakistan who have disappeared over the past decade. Her new work, The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), features an affective archive of gestures and dispositions associated with masculinist leadership, such as charisma, comradeship, and patriotic fervor, which have been assembled from news media. Memorial to Lost Words (2017–18) offers a historically grounded reflection on memory and lamentation, pairing old Punjabi songs with confiscated letters written by South Asian soldiers to loved ones while fighting on behalf of the colonizing British during World War I. The work asks how the testimony of a beloved, South Asian solider in the trenches during the World War I speaks today as warring times persist.

This exhibition is an ensemble that acknowledges multiple forms of living in relation, moving across geographies while holding onto aspiration and desire. With dry wit and expert storytelling, Abidi gestures to how acts of defiance remain legible and embrace irony in her milieu—carving out pockets of liberation from scenes of dominance and forced homogenization.

This exhibition follows on from the artist’s solo survey exhibition Bani Abidi: They Died Laughing at Gropius Bau, Berlin, curated by Natasha Ginwala, which was on view from June 6 to September 22, 2019, and Bani Abidi: Funland at the Sharjah Art Foundation, which was on view from October 12, 2019 to January 12, 2020, cocurated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Natasha Ginwala.

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities

 

Source: BrooklynRail

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities

By Pepe Karmel

Shahzia Sikander, The Scroll (detail), 1989–90. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 13 1/2 x 63 7/8 inches. Collection of the Artist, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

Born in Lahore in 1969, Shahzia Sikander spent part of her teenage years in Africa. In 1989, at the age of 20, she visited London, where she discovered the mystical work of Anselm Kiefer. Returning to Pakistan, she enrolled at the National College of Arts, a bastion of creative freedom under the military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Many of the artists teaching at the NCA were unabashed modernists; others were looking for ways to combine modernism with the tradition of Mughal miniature painting. Sikander chose to study with Bashir Ahmad, who was devoted to preserving its classical language.

Arriving in the United States in 1993, Sikander studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1997, she was included in the Whitney Biennial along with other artists from outside the New York mainstream such as Gabriel Orozco, Cecilia Vicuña, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker. In 1998, Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies showed her together with Byron Kim and Yinka Shonibare. In these years, the discovery of artists from outside the United States and Europe went hand-in-hand with the discovery of artists of color from within the United States. Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, curated by Jan Howard for the RISD Museum and currently on view at the Morgan Library, takes us back to the Big Bang of global contemporary art.

The exhibition (beautifully installed at the Morgan by Isabelle Dervaux) is divided into four chapters. First, we encounter Sikander’s early work, where she used the painstaking technique of Mughal miniature painting to evoke the condition of modern Pakistani women, living cloistered existences under the Hudood Ordinances imposed in 1979. Set within modern versions of Mughal painting’s axonometric architecture, Sikander’s haunting narratives recall the work of Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo.

Shahzia Sikander, Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, 1989–97. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 8 5/8 x 5 3/4 inches. The Collection of Carol and Arthur Goldberg, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

The second chapter of the exhibition surveys Sikander’s two years at RISD (1993–95), where she experimented with radically different imagery: black, flowing ink drawings of women’s bodies, exaggerating breasts and thighs and replacing hands and feet with looping tendrils, like roots turned back upon themselves. These images of what Jan Howard calls “female interiority” were inspired by artists like Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, and Mona Hatoum; by feminist theorists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and bell hooks; and by feminist poets from Pakistan like Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Sikander also used flowing lines of white ink to surround her figures with veils and burqas, sometimes suggesting cages and sometimes protective carapaces. Sikander’s radical reinvention of her artistic identity was assisted by friendships formed at RISD with instructors like the African American painter Donnamaria Bruton and with fellow students like Kara Walker and Julie Mehretu. The artistic exchanges between Sikander, Walker, and Mehretu helped write the agenda for subsequent contemporary art, much as the interaction between Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns determined the key issues for American art of the 1960s.

After RISD, Sikander spent two years at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Stopping in a series of southern cities during her drive from Providence to Houston, Sikander came to see American slavery as a consequence of British imperialism, different from but intimately related to the colonial history of South Asia. Mehretu arrived in Houston a year later. Both of them were deeply involved with the Project Row Houses founded in 1994 by Rick Lowe and a group of local artists, who created a new kind of “social sculpture” by buying and restoring a group of small shotgun houses, some of which became housing for single mothers completing their educations, while others provided spaces for artists to make installations. The project reinforced Sikander’s bonds with other participants such as Mehretu and Fred Wilson, and she also became close to artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Mel Chin, who were in Houston at the time.

In her last months at RISD, Sikander experimented with adding fluid, formless figures to her earlier miniatures, and in Houston this process of overpainting became central to her work. In a recent interview with Rafia Zakaria, she notes that “I was violating my own work in an attempt to unlearn and learn simultaneously.” The formless figures were accompanied by new personae, some borrowed from Hindu miniatures, others from contemporary visual culture. For instance, in Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, completed in 1997, she began with a 1989 painting based on a 16th-century miniature of a man reading, and added a variety of new images: meticulously drawn portraits of Rick Lowe (full-face and in profile), heraldic blazons (one showing the Row Houses), circles containing versions of her self-rooted figure, and disembodied arms clutching knives and hatchets, evoking the Hindu goddess Durga. Around this time, she also broke out of the formal constraints of the miniature, creating mural-scale montages with her new repertory of figures painted directly on the wall or onto hanging strips of translucent paper. (A mural montage in this style forms the centerpiece of the Morgan installation.)

Shahzia Sikander, Intimacy, 2001. Dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 8 1/2 x 11 inches. Collection of Jeanne and Michael Klein; Promised gift to the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

In 1997 Sikander moved to New York. It meant separating from the supportive group of artists she had found in Houston, but she rapidly acquired a new community. In the RISD catalog, Julie Mehretu recalls Sikander’s exhibition openings as bringing together groups that were usually invisible in the art world and that rarely mixed with one another: Pakistani with Indian, East African with African American, trans with cis. Sikander’s major iconographic innovation of these years was an image of two women joined in a weightless embrace: an 11th-century Devata figure in the Hindu tradition of erotic temple sculpture, with her bent knee perched atop the shoulder of the central figure from Agnolo Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid (ca. 1545). Venus steadies Devata by grasping her extended foot and reaches upward to tug provocatively at her necklace. The pair is represented at the Morgan by a 2001 drawing, Intimacy, and a sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), more sensual than its painted prototypes.

However, the effective conclusion of the exhibition is the 2003 video SpiNN (like the television network CNN but spinning). This announces Sikander’s venture into the world of animation, a frequent element of her more recent work. The setting of the video shows the throne room of Shah Jahan, a 17th-century emperor, as depicted in a painting by the Mughal master Bichitr. But the emperor and his courtiers have vanished, and the space is invaded by a crowd of nude gopis (cowherding girls), who are then transformed into a swarm of bat-like black creatures. (These prove, on close inspection, to be remnants of their black hair, pulled up into topknots.) With Maligned Monsters and SpiNN, Sikander moves into the realm of magic realism: a visual equivalent to the fiction of Rabih Alameddine, Salman Rushdie, Qurratulain Hyder, and Gabriel GarcíaMárquez.

Sikander’s extraordinary impact on American art becomes more comprehensible if we revisit the early 1990s, just before her arrival in the United States. The 1993 Whitney Biennial thrust identity politics onto the center stage of contemporary art. At the time, it was widely denounced as excessively political; in hindsight, it seems prescient. Homi Bhabha’s catalog essay, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” provided a manifesto for diasporic consciousness. Bhabha called for a “new internationalism” emerging from “the history of postcolonial migration.” He insisted on “the need to think beyond narratives of origin.” As he saw it, the new avant-garde would focus on “‘in-between’ spaces” and the “interstices” between cultures. In the mid-1990s, Sikander, Mehretu, and Walker began to make art that did exactly that.

Even in 1993, however, Bhabha anticipated that the relationships between communities with “shared histories of deprivation and discrimination” might nonetheless be “profoundly antagonistic [and] conflictual.” There was no guarantee that the utopian community of diasporic artists in New York could provide a model for the larger world. Indeed, the decades since 1993 have demonstrated that artistic heritage can too easily be co-opted into the service of right-wing nationalism.

Sikander’s work, from 1993 onward, ferociously defies co-optation. She subverts heritage as rapidly as she invokes it. Layering images from multiple sources and in multiple visual languages, she operates in the cultural interstices described by Bhabha. It should be noted that an American audience is at risk of seeing Sikander as working primarily in the space between South Asian and Euro-American culture. Certainly, the encounter between these cultures is evoked by her repeated pairing of Devata and Venus.

Shahzia Sikander, Separate Working Things I, 1993–95. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, gold (paint), and tea on wasli paper, 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches. Private Collection, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

What is more fundamental to her work, however, are the tensions within South Asian culture. From the foundation of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century until the subcontinent’s violent partition in 1947, South Asian culture was an indissoluble mixture of Hindu and Islamic elements. Painters and writers drew freely on multiple traditions. After 1947, however, artists and writers in the new state of Pakistan came under increasing pressure to invent a purely Islamic heritage, excluding the Hindu elements of their culture. Conversely, the right-wing government of India has in recent years attempted to eliminate the Islamic elements of the country’s history and culture. Sikander’s work unwaveringly resists this pressure for cultural uniformity.

This resistance is visible in Sikander’s early painting Perilous Order, on view at the Morgan, and in an important series of sequels. Perilous Order began in 1989 as what seemed to be a study in the manner of Mughal portraiture, showing a bearded king or prince in profile, framed within an oval, with a rectangular border filled with elegant, interlacing tendrils. In a recent interview, Sikander explained that it was in fact a portrait of a gay friend, intended as a comment “on homosexuality and its precarious existence within the Punjabi culture of Lahore.” In 1994–97 she reworked the image. First, she added a larger decorative border, covered with swirling patterns. Then she inserted her self-rooted figure, its breasts surrounding the man’s face and its thighs occupying his torso. Finally, she added several nude female figures, one emerging from the inner oval of the portrait, the other three ascending and descending from its rectangular frame.

In a 2001 conversation with Vishakha Desai, Sikander explained that Bashir Ahmad, her guide to the tradition of the Mughal miniature, also introduced her to the non-Mughal traditions of South Asian art. In another discussion, with Fereshteh Daftari, Sikander noted that the female figures in Perilous Order were “plucked from a Basohli painting, an early 18th-century illustration of the Bhagavata Purana, showing maidens whose clothes Krishna has stolen.” Indeed, M.S. Randhawa’s Basohli Painting (Calcutta, 1959) reveals that the nude figures in Perilous Order are exact reproductions of four gopis in an 18th-century miniature, who have disrobed so that they can bathe in a secluded pool.

The gopis from the Basohli miniature are a recurrent presence in Sikander’s work. They appear in her 1995 painting Apparatus of Power, in the 2001 painting Gopi Crisis, and in the early stages of the 2003 animation SpiNN. The narrative of Krishna Stealing the Clothes of Cowherdesses casts some light on the recurring “gopi crisis.” According to the Bhagavata Purana, the god Krishna stole the clothes of the bathing gopis and hid in a nearby tree. After an initial moment of panic, the gopis recognized Krishna and bowed their heads in prayer. Mocking their modesty, Krishna insisted that they climb naked from the water to reclaim their clothes. As Randhawa, the editor of the Basohli album, explains, “When the soul goes forth into the darkness of the unconditioned to meet the Supreme Being to yield herself to Him, she goes in all her nakedness.”

What, then, do the gopis mean in Sikander’s work? In Perilous Order, they seem at first glance to be in orbit around the princely figure. Or are the dark “root” figure and the pale encroaching nudes meant to challenge his masculine authority? (And what does this say about the precariousness of homosexual desire within Punjabi society?) In Gopi Crisis, dark formless figures surround a milling crowd of nudes. What exactly is the crisis? Is it the terror of the gopis, discovered in their nakedness? Or is it their refusal to be intimidated? In SpiNN, the symbolism seems more straightforward: the gopis occupy the seat of power. But then they dissolve into their hairdos and fly away.

There are no simple answers in Sikander’s work. But there is an urgent invitation to walk through the looking glass into a series of different worlds, foreign yet uncannily familiar, where the partitions of other continents reveal the fault lines of our own.

Contributor

Pepe Karmel

Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of two books, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History (2020). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues and for the New York Times, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).

Shahzia Sikander in New York Times - Critic's pick

 

Another week another story on Shahzia in international media! 

Source: NYT

CRITIC’S PICK

Shahzia Sikander’s Exquisite, Entangled Worlds

Her study of miniature painting set the artist on a path to challenge terms that hem us in: East and West, masculine and feminine, abstraction and figuration.

Shahzia Sikander’s “Mirrat I” (1989–90); is among the paintings in her new show, “Extraordinary Realities,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, which traces the first 15 years of her career. It was made while she was still a student at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan Credit...Shahzia Sikander, Sean Kelly and Pilar Corrias

By Aruna D’Souza

Aug. 19, 2021

In a recent essay in The New York Times, the Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander recalls the first question she was asked when she arrived at her M.F.A. program in the United States: “Are you here to make East meet West?”

The question chafed. What could those terms possibly mean for Sikander, whose work borrows from and upends the sumptuous and exquisitely detailed Central and South Asian miniature (or manuscript) painting of the 16th to 19th centuries — an art form woven from the intermingling of Safavid, Mughal, and European empires?

In the paintings, drawings, sculpture and animations on view in “Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities” at the Morgan Library & Museum, East and West, along with other apparently opposed terms — masculine and feminine, abstraction and figuration, traditional and contemporary, here and there — morph and bleed into each other. One comes away hyper-aware of the ways that our worlds, past, present, and even future, are inextricably linked.

“The Scroll” (1989–90), Sikander’s undergraduate thesis project, helped establish her as the founder of the “neo-miniature” movement in Pakistan before she ever arrived in the United States.Credit...Shahzia Sikander, Sean Kelly and Pilar Corrias

Sadequan & Frida Kahlo - Surrealists? International Academic Paper - Univ of Chicago led

Artwallaa is quite excited about this developemnt for multiple reasons, three of which (not all) have been put down below.  

This is after a long time that Artwallaa is seeing an academic paper on Pakistan art appearing in such prestigious institutions (if you know of others. please send across. We'll surely highlight). 

More importantly, international contextualisation of Pakistani greats (artists or otherwise) with other global artists is badly needed but hardly done. Most of the essays/papers are written by Pakistani authors or non-Pakistan authors, with mostly a Pakistan only contect (or in a sub-continental context). most of the foreign media coverage positions it as 'exotic / niche' art, bracketed in the 'miniature' art movement. Academic papers like below bring Pakistan art into the global narrative and create a broader understanding, appreciation and 'main streaming' of Pakistan art. 

Artwallaa is also excited about this paper Bacause Artwallaa has always maintained Sadequain as the GOAT artist of the sub-continent (yes, the whole of the subcontinent!)

Enjoy 

A Sadequain fan

Artwallaa

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Symposium

The University of Chicago - Intercollegiate Art History Symposium - Globalized Perceptions: Art History in the Age of Asynchronicity - U of Chicago

Katherine Beavis, University of Chicago

Ollie Gerlach, University of Cambridge

Kaitlin Hao, Harvard College

Jin Charlie Kang, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Zehra Naqvi, Columbia University

Brenna Tomas, Concordia University

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The Holy Sinner Sadequain - A Surrealist Absolute Reality 

By: Zehra Naqvi 

Source: (ANAH - Univ of Chicago initiative)

Sadequain (~1923–1987) is the artist that defined the birth of modern Pakistani art and inspired many contemporary Pakistani artists who followed suit. He witnessed the independence of India from British colonial rule, followed by the birth of his own nation all in his twenties; those experiences led to his own unique perspective on what he felt was the reality of Pakistan. As an artist, Sadequain has been frequently categorized as a disruptor who sought to represent the reality of Pakistan through dream-like, or even nightmare-like, depictions of unrealistic beings. Interestingly, his work often resembles the style of the Surrealist movement of the early 1920s, which encapsulated depictions of dreams and the subconscious through art. Although not traditionally categorized as a Surrealist, I argue that Sadequain’s Untitled (1985), figure 1, and his larger body of work could be categorized as Surrealist as defined by Rosalind Krauss and Andre Breton. Surrealism, in their definition, creates itself through the factors of the subconscious, representing reality through unreality, and using mirrors to extend the viewer's interpretation of reality all elements that Sadequain uses.1 

In this paper, using Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) as a comparison, I argue that both Sadequain and Kahlo, though both rejected the notion their work was Surrealist (in Kahlo’s case) or dream-like (in Sadequain’s case) ultimately embody the true essence of Surrealism posited by Breton in the First and Second Manifestoes of Surrealism: absolute rationality through irrationality. In order to understand Sadequain’s perspective of Pakistan through his paintings, it is pivotal to grasp the nuanced complexity of his work and his own perception of the country. Describing Pakistan as a land of extremes, Sadequain chose to represent the reality of the wealth gap in Pakistan by acknowledging that people of the upper class were truly idle and unable to express themselves. Thus, they are consistently represented and covered in unrealistically dense and intricate cobwebs indicating their inability to speak their own perspective. Extending this observation to his work, Sadequain consistently portrayed the citizens of Pakistan as disfigured, unrealistic, and even, in some ways, grotesque, often through the inclusion of manipulated naturalistic symbolism.2 

Creating a style that exemplified both the turmoil of reality and the insightful nature of dreams required a motif that Sadequain decided to continuously use; he turned to the Gadani Cactus, which became a repeated motif grounded in realism due to its naturally spindly and unsettling form. The cacti motif became synonymous with mankind, industrialization, and cities that all led to wealth gaps.3 While Sadequain grounded his criticism in reality, a plant, he extended the dreamlike elements of the composition and portrayed an unreality to convey his message. Thus, Sadequain chose to represent reality through unreality. Breton’s consecration of Surrealism first began due to his fascination with Freud’s analysis of dreams and the state of the subconscious, shown in the publication of the First and Second Manifestoes of Surrealism.4 

Describing Surrealism as a form of absolute rationalism through the notion of unreality, Breton began to actively categorize artwork as Surrealist given its ability to portray the depths of our mind and the strange forces to illuminate our dreams.5 As such, I argue that Sadequain could be interpreted as a Surrealist through Breton’s definition. Although Sadequain has overtly said that his work does not depict dreams or falsities, rather the reality of Pakistan as a nation,6 Breton elaborates that what we see in dreams is merely a greater force portraying the realities of life.7 The dreams themselves are an almost purer form of reality than what we see in day-to-day life; this idea is not and was not accepted readily by people simply because we are taught to accept reality as presented to us and view the world through the lens of logic. As such, Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto reconfirms Sadequain’s intent to portray reality through unreality, creating truth by a universally understood medium, the image, for all of Pakistan to understand (even if some of the population is illiterate).8

Figure 1. Untitled (Toilette Series), The Holy Sinner Sadequain, Oil and pastel on board, 

1985, AAN Collection

The conditions of Surrealism outlined by Krauss can be applied to Sadequain’s fundamental artistic practices, including his paintings, calligraphy, and poetry.9 Krauss’s focus on the photographic conditions of Surrealism can be broadly interpreted as fundamental aspects of representation in artistic renderings by which people can identify artwork as Surrealist. Sadequain actively partook in two conditions as outlined by Krauss: mirroring and multiple exposures (or scales).10 Regarding mirroring, Sadequain often used a mirror as a motif in his works, one representing a transcendence into an alternate life or unreality. The focal point of this analysis, and a vivid example of his Surrealist practice, is on an Untitled work (fig. 1) in Sadequain’s Toilette Series which depicts an assumed woman revealing how this series embodies a Surrealist style defined by Breton’s manifestoes. The figure is shown unnaturally, with four arms and two profiles for a face as she dresses herself in front of a mirror while sitting on a stool surrounded by geometric objects. 

The figure’s head appears draped with hair, represented in long black lines extending to the right and left. Note that on the right-hand-side, the hair extends downwards and lands near the aforementioned stool. The figure has four arms: the first connects to what appears to be their left shoulder extending downwards to the left; the second connected to the figure’s right shoulder extending to the right, though first vertically, then horizontally at the elbow; the third is on the left, jutting out of their chest and raised perpendicularly upwards, and lastly the fourth emerges out of the hair, shown vertically but ending in a horizontal extension at the elbow. Each of the apparent hands of the figure holds onto an item. The first grasps the top of a triangular vessel. The second grasps a long stylus-shaped instrument, which we can assume to be a comb. The third hand has its palm opened, facing upwards, presenting a circular vessel topped with a triangle. Lastly, the fourth extends out of the hair on the right side and re-enters into it on the figure’s left side. 

In the Toilette series, Sadequain uses the mirror as an extension of the represented women’s identity. By representing the woman in reality with four arms and no representation in the assumed mirror, Sadequain purposefully alters the viewer’s automatic assumption of the mirror’s function. Rather than reflecting a reality, the mirror is inoperable and represents an unreality in itself. The duality of representation in the multiple arms as well as the opaque mirror force the viewer to consider the dual representations in reality, and not what is portrayed in the mirror. While creating some self-portraits, Sadequain would represent the process of creation, creating a mirrored effect of the art being created and the art itself.11 Regarding multiple exposures, Sadequain chooses to portray a realistic-adjacent representative figure by denoting features of a human (hands, an eye, nose, mouth, body of a human) while still slightly altering our grasp of naturalism. For instance, in Untitled, rather than one profile, the figure has two; and instead of two arms, it has four. Even more so, the background also exhibits multiple exposures by the repeated geometric motif that occurs on both the left-hand and the right-hand sides of the painting creating depth. In another rendition of the Toilette series, At Toilette, Sadequain uses a similar structure to the painting but changes the notion of reality. Rather than switching the figure’s true form itself, Sadequain manipulates the representation reflected in the mirror and depicts a shadow on the mirror’s surface. On the right-hand side, the woman’s profile is cascading towards the left and right repeatedly. In this work, the mirroring and multiple exposures (as elaborated by Krauss) are embodied by the cascading profile of the woman in the upper right-hand corner of the painting. The deviation from a traditional reflection in the mirror calls to Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos as Sadequain deliberately forces the viewer to question the reality depicted in the mirror as opposed to the naturalistic figure; which iteration or reflection are we supposed to see as reality?

Within Sadequain’s Toilette series, both Krauss’ and Breton’s Surrealist conditions are recognized and embodied by Sadequain’s unrealistic depictions of Pakistan making oneself, making identity, making country and the world possible. However, Sadequain has consistently cited his works as portraying a reality of Pakistan, one that extends beyond dreams or unnatural imagery, which contrasts with Breton’s original hypothesis of Surrealism stemming from the unconscious. In fact, Sadequain often worked without sleeping until a canvas was complete to his satisfaction, citing insomnia as a motivating factor that kept him up; thus, he was never in a dreamlike state of subconsciousness when creating his works. He was actively painting what he felt was the reality that laid beneath the surface of appearances.12 If this was the case, how can we continue to argue that Sadequain was a Surrealist?13 In comparison to Frida Kahlo, who vehemently disagreed with the notion that she was a Surrealist, I argue that while both Sadequain and Kahlo cite that their works portrayed reality and not Surrealist-dreams,14 the true intention behind Breton’s manifesto was never about whether the works of art portrayed dreams or not. 

The manifestoes themselves cite using the subconscious to create a state of absolute rationalism, one free from the biases and constraints of a modern world, forcing a logical lens upon the viewer. Thus, while Surrealism is often associated with dreams and unreality, the true intention of Breton’s manifestoes was to portray reality of life at a level deeper and greater than our biased judgement; Kahlo and Sadequain both accomplish this by utilizing unnaturalistic imagery to portray their realities. Both Kahlo and Sadequain utilized this extremist view of their own reality by depicting their own realities as they saw and felt, as well as their own national identities (Mexico and Pakistan respectively). In Fulang-Chang and I, Kahlo utilizes a naturalistic self-portrait on the left side while forcing the viewer to confront themselves in the mirror on right. While there is nothing unnaturalistic about her self-portrait, the inclusion of a mirror to Breton was the embodiment of the Surrealist movement, forcing the viewer to confront their own reality or self-portrait next to Kahlo’s. 

In what seems like a literal interpretation of Krauss’s photographic conditions, Kahlo’s choice to include a mirror is inherently Surrealist whether it is through the painting or a reflective surface that confronts the viewer and their conception of reality. Compared to the Untitled Toilette Series by Sadequain, the consistency of mirroring creates a deliberate link between the two works that otherwise seem entirely different. The mirror in Sadequain’s work is not functional as a reflective surface but rather, it reflects an alternate reality of the figure. Even more so, the figures of Sadequain’s work are not naturalistic. To Kahlo, this portrayal of her reality was accurate to how she felt at the time while other portraits, such as The Broken Column, utilized dream-like imagery to portray her pain post-surgery. While her pain was internal, Kahlo was able to utilize unrealistic imagery to communicate the pain within her, depicted through a broken column, nails fastened into her body, and the metallic corset that locked her into place.15 Similarly to Kahlo, Sadequain often explored the intentions of life’s suffering and chose to depict life as a passage to death through extremist renderings of unnatural states; in Self Portrait: Fasting Sadequain I (Under the Apple Tree), Sadequain emphasizes the rigidity of life by mimicking the oft-told tale of Buddha fasting under a bodhi tree and an ancient Gandharan sculpture.16 His body is shrewdly thin with his skeleton appearing outside his body aptly depicting himself as the “rotting corpse...in Death’s deep slumber;” his face remains the only naturalistic element.17 

Although the title indicates it is an apple tree, the rough crosshatching across the base of each tree calls back to the Gadani Cactus motif representing the withered deterioration of life as it passes. Though Sadequain never suffered as overtly as Kahlo did due to her medical ailments, Sadequain aimed to represent the internal chaos of being and suffering through unnaturalistic imagery that is, arguably, inherently Surrealist. By portraying what exists under the surface of daily life, both Sadequain and Kahlo use Surrealist imagery to portray an absolute reality. Both utilized elements of naturalism, particularly greenery and plants, to ground their interpretations in reality and then portrayed their reality through art beyond what the eye can see in daily life: the reality that communicates their faces, their unique identities, and simultaneously the internal suffering both undertake—whether physical or mental. 

Ultimately, while both Sadequain and Kahlo have argued that they only represent reality and truth, I would argue that the interpretation of Surrealism was always to portray an absolute reality through dreams; it did not necessarily mean that the painting itself was a dream; rather, it was giving the viewer a look into the subconscious truth of the artist through an alternate lens. In that regard, I believe that the initial manifestation of Surrealism (as posited by Breton) had been watered down to largely be interpreted as portraying dreams instead of portraying absolute reality through the subconscious mind. Thus, while Sadequain and Kahlo both maintained that they portrayed reality and not dreams, no matter how unrealistic their paintings were, both used unreality to express their internal strife to the otherwise logical world.

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1 Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October, vol. 19, 1981, p. 3., doi:10.2307/778652.

2 Sadequain and Bhatty, W.K.. On My Work as a Painter in Pakistan. Leonardo, The MIT Press, 1974. In his own words, Sadequain highlighted that the intention behind most of his paintings was to portray the true reality of Pakistan and how he lived life; he argued that his work should be understood as an ultimate reality not necessarily abstract or dream-like.

3 Hashmi, Salima, et al. Sadequain: The Holy Sinner. Mohatta Palace Museum in Collaboration with Unilever Pakistan, 2003.

4 Voorhies, James. “Surrealism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm (October 2004).

5 Breton, Andre. From the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Art in Theory, 1900–2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1992. Breton, Andre. From the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. Art in Theory, 1900–2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1992.

6 Sadequain and Bhatty, W.K.. On My Work as a Painter in Pakistan. Leonardo, The MIT Press, 1974.

7 Breton, Andre. From the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Art in Theory, 1900–2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1992. “the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces.”

8 Sadequain and Bhatty, W.K.. On My Work as a Painter in Pakistan. Leonardo, The MIT Press, 1974. using art as a medium of connecting with a broader audience in Pakistan.

9 Naqvi, Akbar. Image & Identity: Painting and Sculpture in Pakistan, 1947–1997. Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. the scope of Sadequain’s broad artistry.

10 Sadequain and Bhatty, W.K.. On My Work as a Painter in Pakistan. Leonardo, The MIT Press, 1974.

11 Hashmi, Dadi, and Naqvi all reference Sadequain’s tendency to self-represent his process.

12 Sadequain, in his own words, argues that elaborate crow’s nests and cobwebs act as motifs for the internal struggles and evil nature of some people (using unrealism as a means to portray the truth behind a person’s intentions).

13 Hashmi, Salima, et al. Sadequain: The Holy Sinner. Mohatta Palace Museum in Collaboration with Unilever Pakistan, 2003. Sadequain suffered from insomnia whilst painting his larger works.

14 Fulang-Chang and I: Kahlo refutes Breton’s claim that her work is the embodiment and a true example of Surrealism.

15 “The Broken Column - Google Arts & Culture.” Google, Google, artsandculture.google.com/story/the-broken-column/bQJSm_lP61UwJw. The Broken Column: Kahlo’s work post-surgery encompassing her pain.

16 Dadi, Iftikhar. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Univ of North Carolina Pr, 2019. Sadequain’s interest in Gandharan art particularly the collection at The Lahore Museum.

17 Hashmi, Salima, et al. Sadequain: The Holy Sinner. Mohatta Palace Museum in Collaboration with Unilever Pakistan, 2003. The Holy Sinner - quote from Sadequain’s poetry Rubaiyat of Sadequain