Archive April 2000 - 'Acts of Balance' - Shahzia Sikander Exhibition in Whitney Museum

 Source: NYT 

Picking out of archive, older exhibition of Shahzia Sikander - Acts of Balance - with her mural - 'Chaman'

ART/ARCHITECTURE; A Painter of Miniatures on a Maximum Scale

By Barry Schwabsky

May 14, 2000

IT was afternoon on April 20, and that evening would be the opening of Shahzia Sikander's exhibition ''Acts of Balance'' at the Whitney Museum's gallery in the Philip Morris Building on East 42nd Street. By this time, most artists would have been focusing on what they were going to wear, but Ms. Sikander was still there in paint-spattered jeans and a Mona Lisa T-shirt, continuing to work on the art.

''I'm always changing things,'' said Ms. Sikander, stepping into a hydraulic lift that would carry her aloft to work on a triptych showing female acrobats, which had been hung on a wall overlooking the lobby where office workers were eating lunch. ''When paintings come back after a show, I work on them. I'm always putting things in and editing things out, putting things in and editing things out. Nothing is done until it's wrecked.''

That's not what you would expect from an artist whose first training was in the stylized, highly controlled art of Islamic miniatures, in which high finish, not spontaneity, is valued. But then you wouldn't expect such an artist to expand her work to mural scale either, or to mix in imagery from Hindu India and Western pop culture.

Ms. Sikander, who is 31, seems to have been a contrarian at least from the day she set foot in the National College of Arts in her hometown, Lahore, Pakistan. While Western viewers may find the allure of the exotic in her use of the imagery and techniques of the miniature, at home her desire to be trained in the tradition puzzled her teachers and fellow students, who saw it as something that would only impede her creativity. But her work is hardly about adhering to a closed heritage. Instead, it seems to invite previously unrelated pictorial strains to intermingle with humor, irony and often eroticism.

''Even when miniatures were at their height, their aesthetics were incredibly diverse,'' she says. ''Hybridity isn't a new thing.''

After finishing her course in Lahore, Ms. Sikander went on to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and then to a fellowship at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. She first burst onto the New York scene in 1997, with her work appearing in rapid succession in a group show at the Drawing Center, in the Whitney Biennial and in a one-person gallery show at Deitch Projects in SoHo. It says something about the shifting nature of provincialism that while few people were surprised by the sudden rise of a young artist from Pakistan, the fact that she lived in Houston really did seem mysterious. Because her still-undecided immigration status is being handled in Houston, she maintains a studio there as well as one in New York.

Visitors entering the enclosed gallery space where the main part of ''Acts of Balance'' is installed (through July 7) can be forgiven for wondering whether Ms. Sikander's process of adding and subtracting visual elements is still going on. Three walls have been painted with landscape and architectural elements and other images derived from the triptych hanging outside, turning the tall, boxy gallery into a sumptuous imaginary garden. The murals were then partly covered with translucent sheets of yellow tissue paper that have been pinned to the surface here and there. Some of the sheets have also been painted with figures and decorative patterns done in a loose, spontaneous hand. But most of them are just blank, screening the underlying image rather than replacing it.

Asked why she was trimming slivers off the blank yellow sheets -- in a work of this scale, the difference would hardly be noticeable -- Ms. Sikander laughed and said, ''Well, I like to cut hair.'' Everything seems movable, provisional, unfinished. The way ''Acts of Balance'' plays hide and seek with its imagery cannot help recalling Jackson Pollock's remark that he hadn't eliminated imagery from his paintings but simply ''veiled'' it.

Pollock's word rings bells today, when a number of young female artists from the Islamic world have come to prominence on the American art scene. In addition to Ms. Sikander, there are the Egyptian-born, French-educated Ghada Amer and the Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, both of whose work is currently featured in the Whitney Biennial as well as in the ''Greater New York'' survey at P. S. 1 in Queens.

In Ms. Sikander's work, as in that of Ms. Neshat, the veil has sometimes been a powerful symbol, but it has also been an inherently ambiguous one. Sometimes viewers have wanted to find more polemics in the image than the artist intended. When a veiled woman appears in a miniature, Ms. Sikander points out, it isn't a commentary on the veil, and the same can be true of her work when it takes images from the history of miniatures. ''But the reaction to this imagery can get simplified here, and that's something I'm trying to deal with,'' she says. As result, she is trying to focus her work on ''becoming less figurative -- looking formally at miniatures rather than at their narratives.''

''A lot of the vocabulary in 'Acts of Balance' comes from the stylization, the palette, the forms in miniatures,'' she continues. ''So the veiled woman isn't there.'' And yet in a more abstract way, the veiled woman remains the central image in ''Acts of Balance.'' Right in the middle of the central wall, facing each viewer walking into the gallery -- though not the first thing one notices in this strange melange of multiplicity and emptiness -- are the eyes of a woman who gazes out serenely, but also questioningly and challengingly, from behind a metaphoric veil of yellow tissue paper.

The viewer who notices the centrality of this image may come to feel that the art is seeing, studying, questioning him or her rather than vice versa. ''Acts of Balance'' is full of autobiographical references, right down to the images of cowboy boots, a wry reference to Ms. Sikander's current half-willing residence in Texas. But the most self-referential image of all may be this: a clear-eyed young woman at the confluence of many cultures, all in transition.