Portrait of the Artist (Ayad Akhter) by Shahzia Sikandar (Courtesy - AAN Collection)

The Incantatory Power of Ayad Akhtar and Shahzia Sikander

The two artistic geniuses—a novelist and a visual artist—discuss US politics, Islamophobia, and their recent work.

By Ayad Akhtar and Shahzia Sikander

Source: The Nation 

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Novelist Ayad Akhtar, left, and artist Shahzia Sikander, right, discuss their artistic collaborations. (Photos courtesy of author / Vincent Tullo/ Werner Bartsch)

In an age of visual profusion, when the vividness and abundance of images consumed for distraction and commerce is breathtaking, it might seem naive for an artist to try to create images of incantatory, even magical power. To seek a holy relationship to the image today is often seen as foolhardy.

In the Western tradition, before the Renaissance and Reformation, images were the vehicle of presence; they could summon a saint into being. Observers stood in veneration, seeking intercession, dialogue, wisdom; an image was the basis of a relationship with an order of experience far deeper than aesthetic appreciation.

The extraordinary and unique work of Shahzia Sikander proceeds from a faith in this primal power of the image, and in the belief of an artist as a seer. It is a timeless faith, at odds with our accelerated times, which only makes Sikander’s commitment to plumbing the mysterious power of images all the more remarkable.

Over the course of her career, Sikander’s image production has grown at once more subtle and more encompassing. Her reclaiming of the iconography of the Prophet from the historical Indo-Persian painting canon, replete with representations of the otherworldly and its angelic hosts, is more than just a nod to a historical mythos. It is an ensign signaling her profoundest ambition: to reclaim the mythic and sublime not as modes of commentary, or even of expression, but as gateways to experience itself.

In 2015, Sikander reached out to me with an idea to collaborate on a project she was working on. A conversation started, and slowly, we began to work together. Most recently, Sikander has penned portraits based on characters in my new book, Homeland Elegies.

Sikander and I wrote our own questions to guide our conversation about art, Islam, and politics.

—Ayad Akhtar

A detail of Shahzia Sikander’s Ecstasy as Sublime, Heart as Vector mosaic at Princeton University.

How did you meet?

AYAD AKHTAR: Shahzia, I have been an admirer of your work for years. When you reached out to me, unbidden, four years ago I was gobsmacked.

SHAHZIA SIKANDER: I’m not sure what drove me to reach out to you, other than a deep intuition that what drives your work was more than relevant to my own ongoing research. I could sense there was much for us to discuss. I sensed an artist who was plumbing the depths of a heritage we both share—and doing so caught between worlds, between artistic vocabularies, between cultures, practices, histories. I suppose I also felt a kind of kinship with you. We could’ve easily met in Pakistan, in a mutual family friend’s aunt’s home in Rawalpindi or Abbottabad. Oddly, in your new novel, you depict a scene in which you are in the latter city in 2009, when I was also there, filming Bending the Barrels at the military academy.

How did your collaboration begin?

SS: I thought you might be interested in matters of representation and identity—

AA: And I was resolutely not interested in that!

SS: Which I figured out soon enough. But it got us on the subject of Islamic philosophy, spirituality, and the Prophet.

AA: Which is a subject I am often on. One of the things that I find fascinating is how little people are interested in approaching the Prophet as a literary construction. Which is so different from how the Old Testament is now read: where we can approach it as a literary text, with its major figures operating as characters in a story, where we can extract literary and sociological meaning from the narrative and linguistic construction. It’s so clear that the construction of the Prophet’s identity is rich with exactly these kinds of valences, and they are mostly lost because there is so little interest in reading the Quran that way.

SS: The conversation led to the topic of the miraj, in particular its role in Muslim traditions and the complexities inherent in his imagination and depiction, both in Islamic lands and in the West.

Two of four Portrait of the Artist etchings by Shahzia Sikander that accompany text by Ayad Akhtar.

AA: Just to clarify, miraj is the tradition of the Prophet’s miraculous journey into the celestial realms, all of which took place over the course of a single night. Interestingly enough, some have seen the tradition of miraj as part of Dante’s inspiration for his Divine Comedy.

SS: The resulting collaboration, a series of four etchings titled Portrait of the Artist and Breath of Miraj, provides a lyrical interpretation of the Prophet’s celestial ascent. For me, this work was rather uncanny in its timing: I won the Princeton commission around that moment and also started researching several historical miraj paintings with the art historian John Seyller such as the Ilkhanid paintings held in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul, the Timurid miraj paintings in the David Collection in Copenhagen, and the ascension painting attributed to Sultan Muhammad from Khamsa of Nizami, Tabriz Iran, in the British Library. The more I studied the various historical miraj paintings, the more I connected I felt to the visual, stylistic, and emotional intelligence of the works. It was a deeply moving experience. Then I had the epiphany to incorporate the ascension motif in the Princeton mosaic, with the hope to inject a visceral and powerful experience for the viewer.

AA: And to stick an effigy of me into the middle of it!

SS: You didn’t stop me! [Laughing] To clarify, it’s in a separate section of the tripartite related to life and death.

More on Imran Qureshi in Brent's Biennial

 

Blood splatters, soul soda and a giant George Michael: inside Brent's biennial

Explosive presence ... And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood by Imran Qureshi, a paper installation at Ealing Road Library. Photograph: Thierry Bal

From a pandemic memorial to stackable cubes and an epic mural of the Wham! star, small and inviting exhibitions keep the focus local in this inaugural festival

Hettie Judah

Tue 22 Sep 2020 12.31 BST

Source: The Guardian

Biennial reviews often start with descriptions of the perilous journey the critic has undertaken to reach this far-flung spot, with tales of rickety aeroplanes, crumbling mountain passes and venomous insects. But for this, all I had to do was clip the dog on a lead, walk down the road and turn left.

Brent doesn’t just have an art biennial now, though. The London borough is also this year’s borough of culture (or “borough of cultures” as they prefer it). It has been tricky for anything to go ahead as planned, though, meaning the biennial is a hybrid online/offline affair, with real-life art at outdoor sites and in local libraries.

The pandemic has hit Brent hard. For Ruth Beale’s Library as Memorial, 491 volumes in Kilburn Library have been given an “In Memoriam” bookplate. Each can be dedicated to one of the borough residents who have died of Covid-19. After the biennial, the books will go back into circulation and carry their personal memorial with them. It is a quiet, intimate work.

Imran Qureshi’s And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood, by contrast, is an explosive presence in Ealing Road Library. Huge snaking sheets of crumpled paper apparently spattered and stained in blood are suspended from the ceiling, above a couple of the Lahore-based artist’s gilded miniature paintings. A glass box holds thousands more sheets, printed with faint purple images of stylised plants, and splattered in blood-like paint. This, too, is a memorial – albeit a furious one: the traces of turbulent attack seeping through paper in this habitually silent and reverent space.

In less touch-averse times, Qureshi’s crumpled sheets would be a knee-deep installation that visitors could walk through. Certainly, wading through the inescapable traces of violence would have pushed the work’s theme harder.

Rasheed Araeen’s Zero to Infinity at Willesden Library. Photograph: Thierry Bal

Rasheed Araeen, the biennial’s other headliner, has also installed a work that requires interaction: sanitised handling is permitted. The artist’s stackable coloured cubes, Zero to Infinity, are at Willesden Library as part of a pleasingly extensive display. Araeen, whose studio is nearby, is honoured as founder of the important journal Third Text, as an engineer of conceptual “happenings” and, more recently, as a painter exploring philosophical and calligraphic traditions.

A number of bright, geometric paintings derived from philosophical texts are presented with working studies. Explicitly derived from Arabic thought and visual cultures, the paintings expand on the artist’s long-held advocacy for an understanding of modernism that looks beyond Europe and the US.

Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar's new novel

Book review: Ayad Akhtar’s new novel depicts unease of being a brown Muslim in US

By Jim Higgins 

Source: Canton Daily 

Posted Sep 18, 2020 at 1:21 PM
Updated Sep 18, 2020 at 1:26 PM

“Homeland Elegies: A Novel” by Ayad Akhtar. [Little, Brown]▲

Anyone who has seen both "Disgraced" and "Junk" will be prepared for the content of Ayad Akhtar's new novel, "Homeland Elegies."

But even those hard-punching, argumentative dramas don't completely prepare a reader for the high-bandwidth ferocity of Akhtar's book about the unease of being a brown Muslim in the United States and about the destabilizing effect of unfettered greed on this country.

"I wrote 'Homeland Elegies' in something of a fever dream after my mother passed away, and after Donald Trump's election," Akhtar writes in an introductory note for reviewers. "My father was starting to show signs of decline, as was our nation, and I found myself overtaken with a desire to remember."

He declares that "Homeland Elegies" is fiction, not an autobiography. Nonetheless, he gives its title character his own name, and uses the contours of both his life and his parents' lives in the novel, though he gives the parents in "Homeland Elegies" different first names.

To avoid confusing myself and others, I'll refer to the fictional character and narrator as Ayad, and to the living writer as Akhtar.

Trump, partition and Sept. 11
Audaciously, "Homeland Elegies" begins with Ayad's father Sikander, a cardiologist who specializes in heart arrhythmia, meeting with Donald Trump in the '90s for a consultation and minor misadventures. Sikander walks away with a positive take on the future president, which fits his "love of America and a firm belief in its supremacy," in Ayad's words. In contrast, his mother Fatima misses her native Pakistan and the man she might have married, Sikander's friend Latif. Surprisingly, she finds some consolation in listening to polka music: "a homespun Wisconsin reminder she was not the only one who'd come here from somewhere else, not the only one still working to keep alive the memory of another place."

The first 80 white-hot pages of "Homeland Elegies" explore the "Trumpian Weltanschauung," the fate of Latif, the India-Pakistan partition, the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and Sept. 11, culminating in memories of a family visit to Abbottabad, the military city where Osama bin Laden would eventually be killed. These historical events batter and shape Ayad and his parents. The reactions of this novel's American Muslim characters to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are too complex and subtle to summarize in a sentence, but I think it's fair to quote Ayad's thought that they emerged from the tragedy "at once suspects and victims."

Roth, Rushdie and Bork
"Homeland Elegies" often brings two other writers to mind. One is Philip Roth, for multiple reasons. Akhtar has pointed before to 20th-century American Jewish writers as his literary ancestors. Like them, he digs deeply into internecine cultural conflicts, and into the perplexing condition of being slotted by outsiders into a stereotypical religious pigeonhole while not being so observant about that religion. Roth, too, wrote several novels with "Philip Roth" as a character, guaranteeing extra work for future biographers and scholars.

 

Source: Act Theatre 

AYAD AKHTAR TO ASSUME PRESIDENCY OF PEN AMERICA

Pulitzer-winning playwright takes over from novelist Jennifer Egan to lead the nation’s foremost literary and free expression organization

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 8, 2020

(New York, NY) — PEN America today announced that Pulitzer-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar will serve as the next president of PEN America, poised to lead the organization in its mission to promote a diverse literary culture and defend free expression. Akhtar succeeds novelist Jennifer Egan, who has shepherded PEN America through a rapid phase of expansion and success over the past three years as the organization has confronted the manifold challenges facing free speech in the U.S. and abroad.

Akhtar will assume the presidency December 2. His highly anticipated upcoming novel, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co./Hachette Book Group), publishes September 15 and launches at a PEN Out Loud event that evening. He has been a PEN America Trustee since 2015.

“Ayad is a dauntless documenter of our time,” said PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, author of the recent Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. “His writing across disciplines voices the unspoken and lays bare what many would rather keep cloaked. His willingness to break boundaries and risk backlash make him an especially appropriate leader for PEN America at a time when our collective cultural parameters are being renegotiated. He is a fierce advocate and an embodiment of the role of literature as a catalyst for change.”

PEN America is positioned at the vanguard of defending free expression in the U.S. and globally, work poised to grow under Akhtar’s leadership. In recent years, the organization has defended traditional arenas of free expression—press freedom, censorship, protest rights, and digital freedom—and put new free expression issues on the map, in particular infringements on speech on university campuses, online harassment, fake news and disinformation as a threat to free expression, the crisis in local news coverage, and China’s encroachments on free expression well beyond its own borders.

PEN America has also grown its national Membership base of more than 7,500 writers and readers in all 50 states. Over the past year, PEN America has established chapters across the country in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, and Alabama—in addition to its offices in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles—broadening the definition of what the American literary community looks like. This March, PEN America hosted the largest Literary Awards ceremony in the program’s half-century history, elevating established writers, emerging talents, women, writers of color, and those who are setting the course for a new, more diversified American canon.

“PEN America has its work cut out for it in an era when the quest for truth is challenged as never before,” said Akhtar. “PEN America has become a powerful bulwark standing for the power of literature to reveal truths and bridge divides, an essential force amid today’s overlapping crises. I feel privileged to build on the visionary leadership of Jennifer Egan and to work with PEN America’s Trustees, staff, and writers to break new ground in fulfillment of our shared mission.”

Akhtar assumes leadership after a unanimous vote of the PEN America Board of Trustees and PEN America’s Members. It comes as PEN America embarks on a major national initiative to combat disinformation amid the pandemic and the November election, working with writers and free speech advocates to ensure America’s public discourse is free, open, and protected from the menace of fraudulent news and the deliberate spread of untruths.

In addition to the forthcoming Homeland Elegies, Akhtar is the author of American Dervish. His play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His other plays include the Tony Award-nominated and Kennedy Prize-winning Junk, and his screenwriting credits include the Independent Spirit Award-nominated screenplay for The War Within. Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, and the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo—where he serves as a board director.

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. Its more than 7,500-strong Membership network is a nationwide community of novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.

PEN America is headquartered in New York City with offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Where Does a Work of Art Belong?

This book  - Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization by David Joselit (MIT Press, 2020) - addresses very pertinent and important topics - about works of art, their identity, where do they belong in a globalized world. The book refers to Shahzia Sikandar's example too - an artist who was born and raised in Pakistan and is also an American citizen. While the book handles the topic from a Western/'colonial' angle, it is relevant from a lot of people in the 'original/home' countries too who look at these global artists with suspicion too. 

To Artwallaa, art created anywhere, by anyone of whatever caste, creed or nationality belongs to the whole of us - of whatever caste, creed or nationality ! 

This is worth reading! 

Your 'art has no boundaries' believing

Artwallaa 

"The book’s title identifies Joselit’s basic thesis, which plays on the relationship between the literal and artistic meanings of the words “heritage” and “debt.” Literally speaking, countries in the global South owe financial debts to the West. Paralleling its financial exploitation of these countries, the West also attempts to treat their art merely as a resource to be colonized into its ongoing narrative of modernism. But by laying claim to their own indigenous heritages, activating their pasts to refuse to be subservient in the West’s version of art history, in effect, as Joselit writes, “turning art into a kind of currency,” these countries can create alternate artistic futures for themselves. And so what’s needed, he suggests, “is an art historical method that is adequate” to this complex, unparalleled situation. The aim of his examples is to do just that."

Where Does a Work of Art Belong? 

Like the international financial markets, the art museum is a controlling Western institution.

David Carrier

September 5, 2020

Shahzia Sikandar - Times Square (Source - unknown)

When theories, institutions, or objects move from one society to another, they need to adapt to new environments. Just as Mao Tse-Tung had to modify Marxism to fit the history and culture of China, Chinese art museums looked to Western models, but their institutions showed not only paintings, marbles, and bronzes, but also calligraphy and jade

Rosewater Soda, Imran Qureshi & Rasheed Araeen @ Brent Biennial

Source: Art Newspaper

Rosewater soda and a coronavirus memorial: what to see at the Brent Biennial

LOUISA BUCK

18th September 2020 19:31 BST

The London borough of Brent, situated in the north west of the capital, is this year playing host to the inaugural Brent Biennial. Best known internationally as the home of Wembley Stadium, which hosts the FA cup final, this diverse corner of the city will now see 23 new artist commissions spring up in its public spaces, libraries and streets, starting from this weekend until the end of the year. Here are six not to miss.

Dawn Mellor’s George Michael TV Outside (2020) © Benedict Johnson

Dawn Mellor at 499 Kingsbury Road

The British painter Dawn Mellor’s nine-metre-high mural George Michael TV Outside is a permanent celebration of the late singer-songwriter and local hero George Michael who lived in Kingsbury and went to school nearby until his early teens. Less ravaged than some of her other celebrity depictions, Mellor presents a fresh-faced youthful 1980s Michael, brandishing a hairdryer and lolling in stonewashed jeans. He’s framed by his own iconic silhouette from the 1984 Careless Whisper music video and surrounded by a dynamic montage of moments from his life and career. But his pensive demeanour and turbulent surroundings also pay tribute to the personal price he paid as a pioneering cultural and LGBTQ+ figure. Monopoly houses tumble through space and a police helicopter nosedives into a yellow brick road, exploding in a Lichtenstein Wham!

Imran Qureshi's And they Still Seek Traces of Blood (2020) © Thierry Bal

Imran Qureshi at Ealing Road Library

The Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi’s dramatic and unsettling intervention into the Ealing Road Library’s main atrium And they Still Seek Traces of Blood suspends large twisted flourishes of paper splattered in gore-red paint overhead. Thousands more crumpled, paint stained paper sheets are also crammed into a glass-walled chamber. Social distancing forbids physically rummaging and getting submerged in the balled-up paper mountain, but their packed forms still have a stifling presence. These audacious sculptural works play with and off the two delicate paintings rendered by Qureshi in traditional Mughal miniature style, which in turn are quietly subverted by showers of meticulously-executed bloody droplets.