SS: Well, I am interested in the nature of the relationships between text and image, and the processes behind their segregation, especially in the Indo-Persian miniature-painting tradition. The paintings were often torn out of their original book context by collectors and dealers. This has created a disjuncture and visual unfamiliarity with the Arabic or Persian script that originally accompanied the paintings. Often my use of Urdu writing draws upon the implications of such processes of dislocation and redaction. Redaction is a critical issue, especially in terms of how history is constantly being rewritten in both cultural and political spheres.
VND: So in Sharjah there might be a completely different relationship to your work than in London or New York, and again to that in London or New York during the 1990s. Let’s talk a little about New York in the 1990s—identity politics were raging and multiculturalism was everywhere. Sometimes it did mean that people were pigeonholed into a particular category, but it also meant that there was an openness to looking at work with many different lenses and perspectives—that people at least made an attempt to engage. How do you think about that moment for the reception of your work both here in the US and also in Pakistan at the same time?
SS: I came to the US in 1992 to do an exhibition at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC, and stayed on to do a master’s degree in painting and printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design. My first serious exhibitions in New York were in 1997 at the Drawing Center and at that year’s Whitney Biennial. But by then I had already started exhibiting at many other venues across the country. The period from 1989 to 1997 was for me one of extreme experimentation with miniature painting, laying down the foundations for many new directions that I could use to engage with the medium, extending its domain to include large-scale public murals, wall drawings and multimedia installations, as well as exploring collaborations with other artists.
VND: I recall seeing your work in 1993 or 1994, when you had already started dislocating the various layers of technique and form in miniature painting by inverting the center and margin, and by stepping outside of the framing devices. Was this a means to disrupt the familiar and open it up to other narratives of gender and identity?
SS: At that time, I was reading Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, among others, and was fascinated with Eva Hesse’s work and life, as well as Amrita Sher-Gil’s. I was also looking at Bhupen Khakhar’s paintings alongside those of David Hockney. My work started reflecting a heightened engagement with feminism and sexuality, as well as incorporating a postmodern identity. I was interested in cultural semiotics, including Hindu and Muslim iconographies, and in juxtaposing anticlassical impulses in Western art, such as Mannerism, with a variety of outsider aesthetics.
VND: So how were these new directions in your work being perceived in Pakistan in the mid- to late 1990s?
SS: My work was being studied voraciously at the
NCA at the time, as I’d broken into the international art scene, and this signaled that miniature painting was a profitable activity to pursue—I was achieving rapid, museum-scaled visibility. Perhaps much of this sudden embrace of my work happened too fast—a familiar dilemma in an art world that is obsessed with youth. Earlier, while in Pakistan from 1989 to 1993, I had received incredible support from my mentors and peers at the
NCA.
VND: What originally made you develop this passion for miniature painting, and even decide to major in it? It sounds like your teacher, Bashir Ahmed, hardly had any students who followed this path.
SS: At the time, there was no serious interest at the
NCA in critically engaging with miniature painting, which is why it became a natural choice for me. I wanted to understand the social construct of a so-called traditional genre in a contemporary society. However, I was in an odd position, as it was the medium that was most burdened with notions of craft, of low versus high art, illustration versus fine art, skill versus critique, tradition versus the avant-garde and so on. Though it was no fun being subjected to these extremely problematic and polarizing discourses, there was more than enough complexity to dismantle. It was exciting to examine, imagine and explore the many possibilities of a traditional genre whose future had not yet been laid out in any clear terms. And that was the appeal—no one had yet deconstructed miniature painting in any extreme way. My training with Ahmed was rigorous, something like 12 to 14 hours a day, but I was eager to learn the craft, while never losing sight of its potential for experimentation.
THE CYPRESS, DESPITE ITS FREEDOM, REMAINS CAPTIVE TO THE GARDEN, 2012, HD digital projections, installed at Khorfakkan Cinema, Sharjah, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation.
VND: As I recall, you got a big award while at the NCA?
SS: Yes, I think I got all the awards available, the first time that had happened in the history of the college. I received the Haji Sharif Award for excellence in miniature painting, a distinction for my thesis project and most notably the Shakir Ali Award for imagination and vision.
VND: I’ve often thought that your decision to pursue miniature painting when you did was one of the more avant-garde moves you could have made, especially in the context of the highly Westernized teaching methods in South Asia at the time. It seems to me you were a bit of an outsider in examining the miniature-painting tradition while also following it assiduously. You were at the forefront of contemporary miniature painting in Pakistan, but it sounds as if you were still quite alone in this pursuit. This brings me to my next question. I understand that there have been debates in Pakistan recently that you should not be considered a Pakistani artist—you are not being discussed in the context of contemporary miniature painting because you have come of age here in the US. How do you feel about this vis-Ã -vis your training, your engagement with traditional painting and your own contemporaneity?
SS: I would say that I emerged as an artist at the very beginning of the movement. As soon as I graduated I was asked to teach alongside Ahmed, the first time a student of his had ever taught with him. This attracted a new, larger body of students, who otherwise would have been less likely to major in miniature painting. And many of them are now exhibiting all over the world.
PERILOUS ORDER, 1989-97, transparent and opaque watercolor on hand-prepared wasli paper, 26 × 20 cm. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Whitney Museum.
VND: The definition of contemporary miniature painting becomes very reductive if it is simply defined in terms of its location. Is one of the reasons you may not be included in its history now that you have become an international star and are not part of the Pakistani cultural scene?
SS: It’s much more than that—it is politics in full operation. Besides, it’s no longer about being internationally famous or not. Everyone is now in the same boat, more or less, all exhibiting in one or another international art fair or biennial at some point. And many contemporary miniature painters from Pakistan are also living outside of the country. For me not to be included in recent books on contemporary miniature painting is about exclusion in a political sense.
I think it is indicative of such trendy political thinking as “the local” and “the global.” The local/global tension has always been part of the larger dialogue. I think it is more pronounced now because we live in a much more globalized capitalist system. Seen from that perspective, the recent influx of contemporary miniature painting can be seen as a response to the extreme capitalism of today’s international market. Those tendencies were less pronounced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In that respect, my engagement with miniature painting happened at a time that was less marred by this globalizing market—I had the opportunity to flesh out my approach to the subject.
REINVENTING THE DISLOCATION, 1989–1997, transparent and opaque watercolor on hand-prepared wasli paper, 33 × 23 cm. Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Whitney Museum.
VND: So in some ways one might argue that, in the history of Pakistani contemporary miniature painting, you are both a transitional figure but also at the forefront, because you started early, learning from Ahmed, and then were involved in the conscious critiquing of form so prevalent in postmodern discourse over the last decade. So, in the early phase of your career, you were transformative but also transitional, because you were at the cusp. But let me ask you, here you are now living in New York, and you’ve made your career in the West. In the 1990s you were typically called a Pakistani artist living in New York. Now it seems you are called a Pakistan-born artist—you’re an international artist. Does it matter to you how you are defined?
SS: You are right to say that my early work was transitional because I created the bridge from the traditional to the contemporary. You could also describe it as transformational in that many others followed suit. The work I created from 1987 to 1991 in Lahore was important primarily because it resisted the dominant requirement of that time—to produce a contemporary depiction of a traditional ritual. My work challenged the established premises by the insertion of the personal, the untranslatable, the ambiguities of youth, the flux of identity, the narrative as a moving image and the picture plane as an infinite space.
But I think that the local is a contaminated construct. I find it very problematic—it needs to be critiqued because it is self-serving. For example, let’s say that curators are traveling to a particular site—there has been an increasing trend over the last decade or so for them to go and “discover” something. That notion is very problematic. If you turn it around and examine the activity of curators, there is a certain complacency in that idea of discovery, as well as an almost colonial way of perceiving the “other.”
VND: In a way, that sort of thinking suggests that, “until I discover you, you don’t exist.” That’s the mentality behind it. I remember in the early 1990s, when we were beginning to work on contemporary Asian art at Asia Society, lots of curators would call me and say, “I’d like to go to Thailand, can you get me the names of two artists?” or “I want to include an artist from Asia, could you just give me a few ideas?” In the end I said, “Would you do that with German artists, without studying the place, the location, the context?” I was placed in a position where I had to say, “I’m not doing it—you go there, you study it and then we’ll talk.” Also, such thinking raises the question of who is an “authentic” artist of a place—who can represent a nation? So, the question I have for you is this: when someone says—as was said at the Literary Festival in Lahore this year—that Shahzia is not a Pakistani artist, how does it feel personally? And how does that matter in relation to the history of miniature painting and whether you are included in it or not?
SS: First of all, it depends on who said it, as this will shed light on the local politics. I think there is a strategy where, by repeating something, you try to establish it as a reality. You know—when you repeat something often enough it becomes reality? So this sort of rhetoric leads to a politics of exclusion. It makes it easier to rewrite history—a particularly common phenomenon in countries such as Pakistan, which has huge and unresolved issues about its identity as well as deeply entrenched hierarchies of power.
VND: It’s ironic that the arts are one of the few things in the world that have the capacity to transcend place and allow connections to be made, while also being of a certain locale, thus shedding light on both the particular and the prevalent. In part it is that very tension between the potential for connecting across cultures and the potential for being of a place that creates the dynamic of how the arts are seen in the world today. The arts have the capacity to move back and forth, and that’s why it feels to me that it is not useful to create an exclusionary practice in which you say, “This is right and that is wrong”—the arts defy that approach. Especially in a country such as Pakistan, which has a history of restrictions and military rule, the arts always have the capacity to push out against these conditions in some way, and that is why such exclusion feels unfortunate. But, having said that, I will play devil’s advocate and ask, what difference does it make to you? Here you are, an internationally recognized artist, happily married, with a great son, you are flying around, being seen in Sharjah, Berlin, London . . .
