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Sean Kelly is
delighted to announce Shahzia Sikander’s inaugural exhibition with the
gallery and her first exhibition in New York City in nine years. Weeping
Willows, Liquid Tongues is an expansive, in-depth look into Sikander’s
recent work, featuring the artist’s dynamic large-and-intimately-scaled
drawings, a captivating new single channel video-animation, luminous,
intricate mosaics and her first ever free-standing sculpture.
Shahzia Sikander
takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as the point of departure
for her work. From premodern beginnings to contemporary influences, it is
precisely this historical continuum and its continuous capacity for
reinvention that has sparked Sikander’s visually rich engagement in
multiple media. The works in the exhibition explore tensions between power
and powerlessness to present transformative ideas. Sikander's interest in
sociology, psychoanalysis, and the examination of how culture and society
shape the imagination is all fodder for her work. The ways in which
violence, systemic racism, class and cultural fears are deeply entrenched
in media and political representations, be it the fear of the unknown, the
migrant, the immigrant, the Muslim, the LGBTQ community, the ‘other’ and
the various fault lines of race, class and gender also intersect within her
work. In this tangled web, the extractive nature of capitalism appears to
promise liberty and happiness, but too often bestows debt and despair.
These ideas are all explored in her new series of paintings The Shroud,
2020 and Oil and Poppies, 2020, which emerged whilst the artist was
researching symbols of extraction.
Sikander’s first
major sculptural work, Promiscuous Intimacies, borrows its title
from Gayatri Gopinath’s forthcoming essay on Sikander’s practice. This
bronze sculpture, with its sinuous entanglement of a Greco-Roman Venus and
an Indian Devata, explores in Gopinath’s words, “the promiscuous intimacies
of multiple times, spaces, art historical traditions, bodies, desires, and
subjectivities.” In their suggestive embrace, the intertwined female bodies
bear the symbolic weight of communal identities from multiple geographic
terrains. They evoke non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as
foreign and inauthentic, and instead challenge the viewer to imagine a
different present and future. The backward glance of the lower figure
“demands that we understand ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘identity’ as
impure, heterogenous, unstable, and always in process,” disrupting
“taken-for-granted national, temporal, and art historical boundaries."1
Presenting a
comprehensive overview of Sikander’s films, the exhibition will feature
three animations: Parallax, 2013, Disruption as Rapture,
2016, and her most recent film, Reckoning, 2020. The new film, made
from multiple drawings, reveals the cyclical theme of struggle through
kinetic forms. In it, Sikander considers the relationships between
migrant-citizen, conflict-erosion, memory-myth, warfare-fatality,
father-son, and human-nature. The musical score accompanying Reckoning
is written by the inimitable composer Du Yun, awarded the Pulitzer in Music
in 2017, and features the Pakistani singer Zeb Bangash. Du Yun and
Sikander’s decade-long collaborations (including Parallax and Disruption
as Rapture) span Shanghai, New York, Sharjah, Istanbul, Hong Kong and
Pakistan and speak to their ‘creative intimacy,’ female agency and shared
passion for finding common ground through multiple languages.
While questioning
the very concept of national culture, Sikander provides deep aesthetic
reflections on the history of colonialism, capitalism and the formation of
racialized identities in the present. Our ecological condition is a mirror
of social conditions: erosion of climate, borders, rising waters, rising
heat, and displacement of bodies amongst others. All resources are gathered
in the rubric of monetization: language, labor, human intelligence and
human attention. Sikander reimagines the United States’ foundational claims
of freedom and liberty, that were never applicable to all, by presenting
overlapping diasporas and using art to imagine the possibilities of a more
just and livable future. Sikander’s work is not about hybridity. It is not
fusing cultures or aesthetics. The multiple juxtapositions reflecting
gender, race, class, and language differences are arranged and rearranged
to imagine visual forms that challenge fixed narratives and break binary
thinking in all its forms. Sikander's work is the antithesis of the
fictions of purity and authentic national culture.
Sikander lives and
works in New York City. Her innovative artistic practice led to her
meteoric rise internationally in the mid-nineties with survey exhibitions
at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1998, the Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art 1998, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
1999, and the Whitney Museum of American Art 2000. Sikander has had major
solo exhibitions throughout the world, including most recently at the Asian
Art Museum, San Francisco, 2017; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, 2017; MAXXI
| Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome 2016; the Asia Society
Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong, 2016; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 2015; the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. 2012; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2010; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin,
2007; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2007; the Pérez Art Museum
Miami, 2005; and at the San Diego Museum of Art, California, 2004 amongst
others. Sikander has been invited to participate in significant
international biennials such as the Lahore Biennale 01, Pakistan; the
Karachi Biennale 17, Pakistan; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art,
Manege, Russia; the 8th and 13th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the 5th
Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; the Sharjah Biennale 11, Sharjah Art
Foundation, UAE; the 54th and 51st International Art Exhibition of La
Biennale di Venezia, Italy; and The Whitney Biennial, New York amongst others.
In addition, she has been included in notable group exhibitions at
institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art,
Seoul; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Amongst the numerous awards, grants, and fellowships Sikander has received
are the KB17 Karachi Biennale Shahneela and Farhan Faruqui Popular Choice
Art Prize, 2017; the Religion and the Arts Award, 2016; the Asia Society
Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art, 2015; the National
Medal of Arts Award presented by U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham
Clinton, 2012; the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Achievement
‘Genius’ award, 2006; and Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, the National Pride of Honor
Award presented by the Pakistani Government.
1 Gayatri Gopinath,
“Promiscuous Intimacies: Embodiment, Desire, and Diasporic Dislocation in
the Art of Shahzia Sikander,” in the catalog for Shahzia Sikander:
Extraordinary Realities, RISD Museum, 2020.
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