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In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”

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SILENCED ARTIST SPEAKS. The University of Houston (UH) has canceled an opening celebration and artist talk for the exhibition of two sculptures by Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander, after an anti-abortion group said the work, including a golden statue of a woman with ram horn-like braids, was a “satanic abortion idol” and threatened to protest. A few days after the Texas Right to Life group posted the petition to block the sculptures from showing in Texas, UH sent a newsletter announcing the opening events for the show titled “Havah…to breathe, air, life” were canceled, and issued a document about the controversy and the artist’s intention. Sikander responded to The Art Newspaper, saying: “Art should be about discourse and not censorship. Shame on those that silence artists.” She said she was told the planned talk would be pushed to the fall.

MOMA PSI PROTEST. Workers protested outside MoMA PS1 in New York late last week to demand better wages and health benefits, reported Hyperallergic. The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 30, representing installation, maintenance, and visitor engagement workers, led the movement with signs depicting the museum’s new director, Connie Butler. Posters read: “Director Butler: Support your employees and settle a fair contract now!”

THE DIGEST

Jacob Rothschild, a British arts patron of the famous banking dynasty, who led London’s National Gallery, National Lottery Heritage Fund and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, has died at 87. [The Art Newspaper]

The Ethiopian government has asked the UK auction house Anderson & Garland to cancel the sale of a 19^th-century Ethiopian battle shield and to restitute it. The Ethiopian Heritage Authority said the decorated metal trophy was taken in the context of the British battle of Magdala, fought against Ethiopian emperor Tewodros in 1868. [The Art Newspaper]

New details have emerged in a protracted legal battle between a former US Ambassador to France, Craig Stapleton, and the leader of France’s Tajan auction house, art collector Rodica Seward. The suit claims Seward failed to procure artworks for resale as agreed, and which Stapleton paid for, while refusing to return or disclose their location. [ARTnews]

London police seized 23 paintings belonging to Lebanese collector and businessman Nazem Ahmad, stored near Heathrow Airport, and 9 others set to auction at Phillips. For several years US authorities claim Ahmad is funding Hezbollah with the sale of artwork. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Nuria Enguita, the director of Spain’s Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM), has resigned following allegations of conflict of interest. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

The Eiffel Tower was back open this week, after closing for six days due to strikes, but has lost between 1 and 2 million euros in ticket sales as a result of the closure. The workers’ strikes were in protest against the monument’s poor financial management. [Le Figaro]

Hackers infiltrated the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) Instagram account and posted messages decrying “Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” The festival deleted and disavowed the posts, amid controversy over pro-Palestinian statements by attendees during the festival’s closing ceremony. [Hyperallergic]

Italy’s privately run Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT announced plans to widen its European presence, with a new acquisition program at Arco Madrid, and expanding loans and acquisitions.  [Artnet News] 

THE KICKER

‘RUSSIAN CARTIER-BRESSON’ REMEMBERED. Since his death earlier this month at 41, Russian photographer Dmitry Markov is being celebrated as a “Russian Cartier-Bresson,” reports The Guardian. He died just prior to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but there has been no suggestion of foul play. Nevertheless, Markov was arrested in a 2021 Russian opposition protest and his photographs showed searing criticism of Vladimir Poutin’s regime, amassing a viral following for depicting its everyday brutality, as well as the lives Russia’s most vulnerable. “Viewers see some of my subjects as bleak, if not, let’s be honest, depressing. But I feel the opposite: peace,” Markov wrote in his book “Draft” (2018).

The sculpture, which was acclaimed by critics when it appeared in New York’s Madison Square Park last year, was intended to explore the relationship between femininity and power.

Titled Witness (2023), the work features a female figure who levitates above the ground, her arms and legs dissolving into rootlike forms. She floats within the armature of a hoop skirt that contains mosaics depicting plants. She wears a lacy collar in allusion to similar ones worn by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice.

Sikander has said that the work, which debuted alongside another sculpture, was, in part, a response to the paring back of abortion rights in the United States, including the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Amid those developments, Sikander wrote in a statement accompanying the work, came a dismissal of “the indefatigable spirit of women who have been collectively fighting for their right to their own bodies over generations. However, the enduring power lies with the people who step into and remain in the fight for equality. That spirit and grit is what I want to capture in both the sculptures.”

Now, the work is to appear next week at the University of Houston in Texas. Some conservative groups have called for it not to go on view at all, calling its imagery abject.

Earlier this month, Texas Right to Life, a self-described “pro-life” organization that has been credited with helping undo Roe v. Wade, claimed the work enlists “satanic imagery to honor abortion and memorialize the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” although it did not describe what that imagery was. (Sikander’s artist statement about the work contains no mention of satanism.)

“Disobedience to God certainly should not be esteemed by society, much less lauded with a statue,” the group wrote. “On the contrary, art should reflect truth, goodness, and beauty: three timeless values that reveal the nature of God. Art cannot have beauty without truth. Art cannot have truth without goodness. A statue honoring child sacrifice has no place in Texas.”

The Sikander work has previously been a subject of controversy in conservative media, with Fox News having run a report on X users calling the sculpture “demonic” in 2023.

Sikander did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Axios reported that Texas Right to Life had been referring to a booklet about Witness published by the Madison Square Park Conservancy that mentioned Abrahamic religions, which refer to horned beings.

“The trope is not the artist’s alone: horned gods and goddesses abound in world religions, from ancient Egypt and Greece to other parts and eras of Africa and Europe. In the Abrahamic faiths the horned beast is associated with forces of evil, chaos, and destruction—the devil himself,” critic Aruna D’Souza writes in the booklet.

D’Souza continues, “but again, Sikander reveals to us what’s really at stake in such conceptions. In the biblical story of creation, Satan and Eve are intertwined the way a snake wraps around a tree limb; woman is the vehicle for iniquity, the temptress, the instrument of evil. Sikander takes this idea, one that runs through so many cultures and epochs and philosophies—of woman as a threat, as an embodiment of unspeakable desire, as taint—and turns negativity into power. Her Eve, her Havah, sports her horns like a crown, as a point of pride. She understands the endless projections onto herself as her strength.”

In an FAQ about Witness, the University of Houston acknowledged that the work might be “offensive to some people,” adding that “the sculpture has braids shaped like ram horns, representing the unification of disparate strands. Ram horns have significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as Central and South Asian beliefs, often associated with power and valor. The artist has said the braids link to one of her paintings that represents the courage, fluidity and resilience of the feminine.”

Following the controversy, the University of Houston ended up canceling the opening and an artist’s talk planned for the sculpture. After the cancelation, Sikander told the Art Newspaper, “Art should be about discourse and not censorship. Shame on those that silence artists.”

The Sikander sculpture is the latest in a series of artworks that right-wing groups have labeled “satanic.” Others include performances by Marina Abramović and a Simone Leigh sculpture that temporarily appeared in the former site of a Robert E. Lee monument in New Orleans.

Update, 2/27/24, 10:55 a.m.: This article has been updated to include mention of the canceled opening for the sculpture.

Scroll I, her five-foot long, multi-scene thesis project that she executed in 1989-90, updated traditional traditional skills she’d been taught. In various rooms of a large, beautifully furnished home, a young woman with long, dark hair dressed in white and seen from her back, walks and, at times, interacts with family members and servants. About the lengthy, well-received work on paper, Sikander once explained, “I was making a statement on the restlessness of youth and the quest for identity.” Subsequently, she became a lecturer at her school, and was credited with starting a neo-miniature painting movement.

In the years since, Sikander has made art in a variety of mediums. Besides paintings, both small and mural-sized, she has worked with watercolor, gouache, ink, and graphite on paper that she’s specially treated. She’s painted on glass, created mosaics using stone and marble, and produced room-sized, site-specific installations. Along with prints and photographs, she’s made digital animations replete with music.

And so it was surprising to some when Sikander, who tends to excel at whatever she does, moved into the third dimension. So far, she’s executed three remarkable figurative sculptures, some of which can now be seen around New York.

In an interview, Sikander said that, as a painter, she had looked to sculpture for inspiration. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to make sculpture,’” she recalled.

Her interest in creating in the medium was piqued in 2017, when she served on New York’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. That’s when, according to the artist, she was “exposed to tension-ridden situations around public monuments, their complicated histories, historical reckoning, and conflicts between competing visions of history.” She felt her own work had a “similar ethos, engaging with colonial and Orientalist histories and their often reductive representations of the Other.”

Instead of looking at sculpture to generate paintings, Sikander mostly consulted her own unique body of work to make her three-dimensional figures. Aspects of her four full-length figures can be discerned in her earlier paintings and drawings where she already introduced similar nudes and motifs.

Maligned Monsters (2001), executed in graphite, ink, and watercolor and just 13-by-5 ¼-inches, for example, morphed into her first sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020). The work on paper, which contrasts a pale figure in front of a more elaborate goddess, morphed into the latter piece,  featuring two substantial bronze nudes that together measure 42-by-24-by-18-inches. The artist borrowed the title from an essay on her work by scholar Gayatri Gopinath. As Gopinath put it, “Sikander’s work traffics in promiscuous intimacies… We can understand Sikander’s work as promiscuous in the sense that it lays bare the intimacies, the deeply imbricated nature, of apparently discrete aesthetics and cultural traditions, histories, and geographies.”

Sikander also had to consider a practical matter. If she placed her two nudes in an unusual configuration, she had to be sure her sculpture would not topple over. Fortuitously, when she hired two models to pose for her work, she discovered one figure could indeed balance atop the other. She photographed them for further study.                 

The topmost nude figure is similar to 12th-century Indian sculptures of a celestial dancing figure. Her companion, who reaches up to tug on a necklace, evokes Bronzino’s goddess in his 1545 painting Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. In Promiscuous Intimacies, East meets West. Centuries are spanned. The past transports us to the near future.

Sikander’s NOW (2023), which is currently installed among a group of robed male figures on the roof of the Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, just across the street from Madison Square Park, also relates to earlier paintings and drawings by the now 54-year-old artist.  

Besides having NOW emerge from a cluster of lotus leaves, Sikander, as she had done earlier, replaced the majestic sculpture’s arms and feet with winding roots. As she explained to me, in her previous paintings and drawings, “There was so much more to explore in terms of layers of ideas and complexity.” She thought to herself, “I’m going to dismantle what I’ve done and see what happens.”

When Sikander placed NOW on an unoccupied socle—its predecessor had been removed years ago—her work functioned differently than it would have had she put her sculpture on a pedestal in a museum. After all, a lone, ethereal woman on a courthouse roof viewed among a group of nine robed men is exceptional. Moreover, Sikander’s sculpture is not an allegorical figure of Justice who wears a blindfold or holds a scale.

Instead, she wears a golden catsuit as if she were a stand-in for Irma Vep, the character in a fictional movie within a movie from 1996 as well as a fictional television series within a movie from 2022, both directed by Olivier Assayas. Her intricate collar and pleated jabot in the style of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the only pronounced aspect of her clothing. As Sikander told me, “I’m interested in detail, not as embellishment but as a concept.”

Purple lotus flowers enhance NOW’s presence. Ubiquitous in South Asian sculpture, these natural growths often accompany images of Buddha. They refer to humility, clarity, awakening.

Because it is located in Madison Square Park, Witness (2023) is more immediately accessible. Like NOW, the figure dons a bodysuit, has arms and feet comprised of roots, and wears her hair in spiraling braids that look like ram’s horns. A voluminous, open work skirt projects the sculpture skyward. And it is decorated with a colorful, winding mosaic band that features plants, the detail of at least one head, assorted abstract forms, and Urdu calligraphy.   

Sikander wanted, she said, “to create an armature where Witness would not touch the ground.” The hoop skirt, which also alludes to the stained glass domed ceiling in the nearby courthouse, was the solution.

For Sikander, the space of this sculpture is heroic. Unlike her miniature paintings, she was not restricted by size. “The world,” the artist said, “is bigger.”

An augmented reality (AR) snapchat app and a video animation complete Sikander’s offerings in Madison Square Park. Apparition, the AR, is a ghostly rendering of NOW that mingles with people dressed in winter coats visiting Witness. The particles that fall resemble snowflakes. Are we viewing the present and some sort of depiction of afterlife?

Reckoning, a 4-minute video animation that is projected on a screen after dark, on the path between Witness and the courthouse, relates to Apparition. Its opening moments picture the cosmos being created. This gives way to particles that become a rock-strewn landscape that next leads to an expanse of blue (is this water or sky?). Flowers are scattered about and leafless branches sway to the music that has been playing. A duel between Medieval warriors is fought. Eventually, colorful particles reappear.

We tend not to think of Sikander as an abstract artist. But both the opening and closing of Reckoning reveal this other side of her.

NOW and Witness represent an ensemble collectively entitled, “Havah…to breathe, air, life.” In an extensive statement on her Madison Square Park project, Sikander wrote, “How we experience art, how we respond to it and how we interpret it is an open-ended premise. As an artist, it is my intent to create something wonderous and with many possible associations—something that can generate thought and produce difference.” Sikander has achieved this in spades.

Correction, 4/14/23, 1:40 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the name of Sikander’s latest video. It is Reckoning, not Rapture.

Shahzia Sikander.

MATTHIAS ZIEGLER

Shahzia Sikander, the Pakistani-American artist whose works delves into drawing, painting, animation, installation, performance, and video, has signed on to show with Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. She will figure prominently in the gallery’s booth at the Armory Show next week, with longer-range plans including a solo exhibition at the Chelsea gallery, to be presented in late 2017 or early 2018.

Kelly, whose program includes Marina Abramović, Jose Dávila, Tehching Hsieh, Joseph Kosuth, and Kehinde Wiley, among others, said, “What’s particularly interesting about Shahzia’s work is the way it reinvents a traditional medium that is centuries old and has a particular history and brings it into the 20th and 21st centuries in a dynamic way that is personal, polemicized, and politicized. She has achieved one of those rare acts of reinvention where she takes a storied and venerable history and adapts it for her own ends.”

Shahzia Sikander, Disruption as Rapture (still), 2016, HD video animation with 7.1 surround sound, 10 minutes, 7 seconds.

©SHAHZIA SIKANDER/COURTESY SEAN KELLY, NEW YORK/COMMISSIONED BY PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, 2016

At the Armory Show, open March 2–5 on the west side of Manhattan, the gallery will exhibit a video work and a large work on paper measuring around 3 by 7 feet. Sikander will also participate in a panel discussion there, on Saturday, titled “A Conversation on Tack, Whack and Quack,” with Patricia Cronin, Maura Reilly, and moderator Eric Shiner.

Other recent hallmarks for Sikander include large-scale commissioned works—a 66-foot mosaic and a 25-foot painting on multilayered glass—on permanent display in a building that houses the economics department at Princeton University and an animation work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where an animation piece by the artist features in recently renovated galleries for South Asian art.

About art made manifest in so many different media, Sikander told ARTnews, “All of the work is tied closely to the act of drawing. I think drawing is notational, very much about thinking and writing, and from there it can take on different directions of scale, space, medium, or light. Drawing is a beautiful investigative tool.”

Her work’s roots in Muslim and Hindu traditions of miniature painting earned Sikander the Religion and Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion in 2016. And it could have extra resonance now in a geopolitical scene roiled by recent ruptures.

“I did a piece called The Resurgence of Islam in 1999 that became very prescient post-September 11,” Sikander said, “but I think right now it’s actually much more relevant. The multivalence of the work has always found relevance.”

Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties), 1986–90, performance prop: business card with printed text on cardboard.

©APRA FOUNDATION BERLIN/COLLECTION ADRIAN PIPER RESEARCH ARCHIVE FOUNDATION BERLIN

MONDAY, MAY 23

Talk: Shahzia Sikander and Eleanor Heartney with Phong Bui at Pratt Institute
This talk, titled “Democratic Vistas,” focuses on globalization and art—a topic that, by now, has become somewhat tired, but which thankfully includes Shahzia Sikander, the exciting Pakistani-American artist. Sikander is best known for appropriating the form of miniature painting and then subverting it, populating her images with violence that refers to various conflicts across the Middle East. She and Eleanor Heartney, a contributor to Art in America (which, full disclosure, is owned by the same parent company as this magazine), will look at how globalization has changed the way we make and think about art. Phong Bui, the editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Rail, will moderate.
Pratt Institute, 61 Saint James Place, Brooklyn, 6:30 p.m.

TUESDAY, MAY 24

Screening: “Two Videos by Adrian Piper” at Light Industry
From 1982 to 1984, Adrian Piper taught mostly white audiences how to dance to funk music, a genre that had been embraced by black culture. In doing these performances, titled Funk Lessons, Piper was looking at how different bodily movements function depending on the identity of the performer. Can gestures be racially coded? Several years later, Piper, who is black, but very light-skinned, staged another performance in which she handed out a card to unsuspecting people. “Dear Friend, I am black,” it begins. She then filmed their reactions and documented these “meta-performances,” as Piper calls them, on video. As expected, they differed greatly based on the identity of the unwilling audience member. Videos of both performances are rare, but they’ll appear together in this must-see screening.
Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $8

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25

Installation view of “If Only Bella Abzug Were Here,” 2016.

COURTESY MARC STRAUS

Opening: “If Only Bella Abzug Were Here” at Marc Straus Gallery
To celebrate the life of Bella Abzug, a congresswoman and activist for equal rights, human dignity, environmental causes, and sustainable development, Marc Straus Gallery has organized a group exhibition featuring women artists including Nicole Eisenman, Shirin Neshat, Genieve Figgis, and Emily Wardill, among many others.
Marc Straus Gallery, 299 Grand Street, 6 p.m.

Screening: Eva Hesse at Film Forum
Directed by Marcie Begleiter, this documentary showcases the life and decade-long career of one of America’s greatest postwar artists. The film collages footage of her Post-Minimalist sculptures—which she created from latex, fiberglass, and plastics—with that of interviews with peers such as Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham, and her mentor Sol LeWitt. Hesse died from a brain tumor at the age of 34, but, as Arthur Danto once wrote, her work was “full of life, of eros, even of comedy…Each piece vibrates with originality and mischief.”
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, 8:35 p.m. Tickets $14/8

THURSDAY, MAY 26

The invitation to Sara Murphy’s “How to Read a Room,” 2016.

COURTESY CLEOPATRA’S

Screening: Ericka Beckman at Anthology Film Archives
Ericka Beckman emerged in the late 1970s as a filmmaker of the Pictures Generation, having created a variety of complex and formalist Super-8 movies. Though she earned an M.F.A. from CalArts and studied under John Baldessari, Beckman quickly gravitated toward cinema over plastic or other conceptual mediums. Here, Anthology will screen her “Super-8 Trilogy,” which comprises the three films WE IMITATE; WE BREAK-UP (1978), THE BROKEN RULE (1979), and OUT OF HAND (1981). These films were influenced by the theories of the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 7:30 p.m.

Opening: Sara Murphy at Cleopatra��s
Cleopatra’s remains mysterious regarding this new exhibition of work by Sara Murphy, titled “How to Read a Room.” A single image provides a clue: an open notebook shows a sketch of a person sitting in a chair, flanked by graphic lines. The sketch takes an aerial point of view, making the viewer feel like they are participating in either a master class of human gesture, or a more insidious study of human nature.
Cleopatra’s, 110 Meserole Avenue, Brooklyn, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, MAY 27

László Moholy-Nagy, A II (Construction A II), 1924, oil and graphite on canvas.

©2016 HATTULA MOHOLY-NAGY/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDING COLLECTION

Opening: “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present” at Guggenheim Museum
It’s no coincidence that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s work feels so prescient—the Hungarian artist’s work was often about using technology to push art in the future, and now it seems that young artists have caught up with him. In the early 20th century, at a time when many modernist artists were still thinking of abstraction in oil-on-canvas terms, Moholy-Nagy pushed painting far beyond where artists thought it could go, attaching such industrial elements as glass and steel to his canvases. But Moholy-Nagy’s interest in how abstraction and technology were perfectly matched didn’t end there—he also created camera-less photography as a way of looking at how technology had positively changed the way we perceive light and other humans. Walking around Lower East Side these days, one can see how art has begun to look like Moholy-Nagy’s. And the title of this retrospective, the first comprehensive one in America in half a century, pays homage to that—it’s rather accurately called “Future Present.” —Alex Greenberger
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:45 p.m.

Jordan Kasey, Tired at Breakfast, 2016, oil on canvas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIGNAL

Opening: Jordan Kasey at Signal
On the heels of the Whitney Museum’s “Flatlands,” an exhibition of young figural painters, comes Jordan Kasey, whose work evokes a landscape where people and things are improbably thrown together. In one painting, a black figure has fallen asleep while eating Fruit Loops in milk; in another, an androgynous person, sans any eyes, sees their reflection from two different sides. Something about her mysterious work evokes René Magritte by way of the digital—an Internet-inspired Surrealist fantasy where images mash together and produce unexpected combinations. This show, titled “Free Time,” is Kasey’s New York debut, and it certainly seems promising. —Alex Greenberger
Signal, 260 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn, 7–10 p.m.

Screening: Orpheus at Anthology Film Archives
Anthology will screen Jean Cocteau’s 1950 variation on the classic Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, one in which Orpheus is a famous French poet and Eurydice is his pregnant wife. Of this film, Cocteau once said, “Orpheus could only exist on the screen. A drama of the visible and the invisible, Orpheus’s death is like a spy who falls in love with the person being spied upon. The myth of immortality.”
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 8:30 p.m.

Shahzia Sikander, Untitled, 1993.

COURTESY SIKANDER STUDIO

Women’s personal lives are often overemphasized in documentation and critical writing surrounding their work. My art has often been read as being by the “other” as a result of representing South Asian artistic practice in New York City.

The introduction of my work to the New York scene in the 1990s spurred curiosity and met with a great reception. My exhibition at the Drawing Center and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, both in 1997, were among the first exhibitions of contemporary miniature painting in New York. Even though people were connecting with my work in miniature painting, they were unable to fully understand and contextualize artistic production from the region. The reviews from the time bordered on being ethnographic.

For example, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote a review of several shows of South Asian art in 1997 saying, “If you like New York City, chances are you’ll like India. Midtown Manhattan at lunchtime and an Indian village on market day are surprisingly alike. Cars and bikes charge by; personal space is at a premium; the noise level is high; the sheer variety of people exhausting.” He goes on to discuss the “Out of India” show at the Queens Museum, in which I participated. About its reception, Cotter wrote, “That audience is still, it is true, relatively small, but it will grow. At the moment Ms. Sikander must bear the unenviable burden of being a breakthrough figure, with work dynamic enough to capture the attention of viewers who have little direct knowledge of her sources. But there are other artists waiting in the wings to join her in an art world that is now global.”

As Cotter accurately expresses, the lens shifts from the work to the individual: it became very tied to me, since there were so few South Asian artists in New York—it was as though the artist had to stand in for lack of visibility of related work. As a woman, I’ve often felt that readings of my work overemphasized my ethnicity. Furthermore, the complexity of my status as a transnational artist is often lost in the Pakistani-American bond that art institutions often impose. In many of the interviews that I have been asked to participate in, interlocutors ask me more about my personal identity and relationship to Pakistan than about my artistic practice.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 57.

Kehinde Wiley.

KWAKU ALSTON/COURTESY ROBERTS & TILTON

New York-based portraitist Kehinde Wiley will be awarded the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. Known for his flashy paintings that depict black men and women in the style of Old Master portraiture, Wiley is being honored for using his art to promote cultural diplomacy. He will receive his medal from Secretary of State John Kerry on January 21. Past medal honorees include Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.

First awarded in 2012, the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts is given to artists for their commitment to Art in Embassies, a diplomatic program that encourages U.S. artists to go abroad and work with other artists. For AIE’s latest project, set to happen in 2017, Jenny Holzer will make a collaborative sculpture at the U.S. Embassy in London.

The announcement precedes another landmark in the artist’s career—”Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” the painter’s first museum survey, which will open at the Brooklyn Museum in February.

Roberts & Tilton, one of the galleries that represents Wiley, confirmed the news.

Ian Berry likes to think of the Tang as Skidmore’s surrogate football team.

ARTHUR EVANS/COURTESY FRANCES YOUNG TANG TEACHING MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE, SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK

“We wanted to engage traditional users of museums —artists, art historians, cultural historians, anthropologists—but also scientists, dancers, economists, geologists, environmental studies majors, business majors, physics students, and invite them into the museum to use their own vocabularies,” says Berry, who was promoted to director a year ago. “The focus on contemporary art has been a great decision for the museum because we could insert the artists into that interdisciplinary dialogue.” When he invited Alyson Shotz to do an exhibition at the Tang in 2003, for instance, he connected her with the college’s science faculty—since the artist’s work is informed by her study of science —and the entire freshman class was assigned to attend a lecture between Shotz and the professor of environmental studies. “It enacted in real time that someone who is working in something called ‘the art studio’ and something called ‘the biology lab’ can actually be responding to similar goals and ideas,” Berry says.

Since opening in October 2000, the Tang has become a leader in the world of teaching museums. It draws more than 40,000 visitors a year, and generates around a dozen exhibitions yearly, including substantial surveys of such contemporary artists as Fred Tomaselli, Amy Sillman, Richard Pettibone, Shahzia Sikander, Los Carpinteros, Trisha Brown, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., and Jim Hodges—many of which have traveled nationally to academic as well as nonacademic institutions. A large percentage of Skidmore’s professors design assignments around the Tang’s exhibitions and hold classes in the museum. “We want it to be a place on campus that everyone uses daily, like the library,” says Berry. “You don’t just come once a year to a big show, but you come in and out for whatever you need to use it for.”

The Tang is also distinguished by its large-scale interdisciplinary shows, which Berry organizes every year in partnership with various Skidmore faculty members who go on studio visits, write catalogue essays, and help design the exhibition layout. “I’ve been able to serve as cocurator of shows about the Hudson River, Shaker design, mapping, and variable stars—all things that I’m interested in but certainly not an expert on,” he says.

For the first of these shows, in 2001, which focused on the use of mapping in art and science, Berry asked a biology professor for an example of a dream object in his discipline. The professor’s response was James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of the DNA double helix—and together, the curator and the biologist were able to borrow the original prototype from Watson, who still had it in his office. Exhibiting that historic object alongside atlases of North America, 16th-century anatomical diagrams, and works by some 20 contemporary artists including Matthew Ritchie and Micah Lexier, Berry says, “teased out new connections that a curator working only with art objects might not have discovered.”

The current interdisciplinary show, on view through March 9 and titled “Classless Society,” was co-organized with an English professor and an economist. It explores the idea of class in America from various social and economic perspectives using music, film, literature, and advertising. These are displayed alongside artworks including photographs by Nikki S. Lee, in which she impersonates members of disparate communities.

Berry grew up outside Albany, where both of his parents worked in state government. He double-majored in studio art and art history at the University at Albany, State University of New York, but he quickly realized that his talents were curatorial. “I was spending more time making exhibitions for myself than I was thinking about what I was making,” he says. “I thought about ways I could still have a foot in the studio environment, which I loved, but use the skills I could offer.”

One of Berry’s art history professors introduced him to Ellsworth Kelly, who hired Berry as a a studio assistant after he graduated in 1995. “Ellsworth was a great teacher for me in many ways but most importantly in how to see, not just art but nature and forms all around us—how birds look when they fly, how leaves change during the seasons,” Berry says. The job also gave him a close-up view of the art world, as curators, museum directors, and collectors often came through the studio. He applied to Bard’s nascent curatorial graduate program, which proved to be an important training ground for contemporary curators, and landed a curatorial assistant job at the Williams College Museum of Art after a summer internship there. He didn’t know what would come of his move to Skidmore, “but the excitement of a startup was seductive,” he says. “We were only a few people, starting a museum from scratch where there had not been a history before.”

Today, Berry likes to think of the Tang as Skidmore’s surrogate football team. “The football team is a traditional way for a lot of people to enter into what seems like a very private place of a university or a college and see what’s going on for a few hours on a weekend,” he says. “Skidmore doesn’t have a football team, but the Tang is a place for the community and alums to rally around, a place for people to come in and see what students and faculty are thinking about.”

Shahzia Sikander: Her imagery crosses boundaries of geography, religion, and style.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY, LONDON AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

A murky black rectangle glistens and undulates on the screen of Shahzia Sikander’s laptop as the artist shows a visitor to her New York studio a passage from her animation in progress.

Gradually, the field seems to disintegrate into a dense accumulation of irregular black marks that vanish one by one. Viewers familiar with Sikander’s work may recognize that these seemingly abstract black shapes are in fact precise renderings of the stylized hairdo of the Gopi women—worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna, whom Sikander often depicted in her miniature paintings from the 1990s. The hairdos have reappeared, disembodied, in many of the animations that set her repertoire of painted imagery in motion, including SpiNN (2003), in which the hair rises from the women’s disappearing bodies and takes flight in a menacing swarm that invades an imperial Mughal court.

“I found the hair had this wonderful silhouette that, if you turned it around, could look like bats or birds—that was a very exciting moment in animation for me,” says Sikander. She used this silhouette to create the floating, oily ground in the large-scale projection she was preparing for the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates (on view through May 13).

“I’m still going to the same image but trying to find another way to transform it. I’m not trying to hide where they come from,” she says of the hair shapes, “but they need not be associated with their source. I’m interested conceptually in the distance between the translation and the original.”

All of Sikander’s works, from her small drawings to her room-scale painting installations to her giant animated videos, stem from her study of traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting in her native Pakistan in the late 1980s. “It was a very independent choice—of examining a style, school, genre, and developing a relationship, a language, a dialogue with it,” says Sikander, who was attracted to the seductive beauty of the stylized gemlike miniatures and fascinated by the insularity and seeming immunity to translation of the forms.

Since moving to the United States in 1992, Sikander, 44, has been exploring ways to stretch and pull apart the vocabulary of miniature painting in different media and at different scales, creating a hybrid imagery that blurs such polarities as Hindu and Muslim, traditional and contemporary, East and West, representation and abstraction. Fundamental to the work is the fluidity with which Sikander shifts perception and challenges our ways of seeing.

In the 2004 animation Pursuit Curve, for instance, a large flowerlike form starts to agitate and break apart, its fluttering reddish parts evoking insects or feathers. Gradually the shapes settle as turbans on a cluster of bearded men. “It’s an image which is already loaded,” says Sikander of the turbans. “It’s masculine. It’s got race and religion. When it’s flapping around, it’s like butterflies and fragile, and then it fits on and all you see is turban. I like that there are multiple reads and facets to a situation, and that the dissociation can be that stark.”

“Shahzia mixes history, personal feelings and experiences, and very contemporary art making—firing on all cylinders at the same time—in her masterfully crafted works,” says Ian Berry, director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, New York, who in 2004 organized a large survey of her work there that traveled to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. “The artwork can respond to people’s desires to think about politics and biography, not just of Shahzia’s but of their own. And then other people can come to it and respond entirely to line, form, color, movement, and perspective, and the creative things Shahzia brings to that.”

The Tang is one of many museums to host solo exhibitions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in 1999. Sikander was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Today, she is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, where her works sell for up to $125,000.

Women’s coiffures, transformed into black birds, invade a Mughal court in the video animation SpiNN, 2003.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY, LONDON AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

Sikander grew up in Lahore, in a house adjoining those of her grandfather and aunts and uncles. “I have a very supportive and educated family with strong women—writers, academics, human-rights activists,” she says. She always drew as a child and happily did all the diagrams for her cousins’ science homework. (The nuns at her Catholic school kept some of her illuminated notebooks.) Her parents encouraged her to apply to the National College of Arts.

There, in 1988, Sikander attended a lecture on miniature paintings given by a visiting curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum, an experience she describes as life changing. Familiar only with the kitschy creations sold to tourists, she was stunned by the “immense range and visual connections” of the images shown by the lecturer. “I felt potential,” she says.

Her idea was to explore personal imagery within the thematic guise of miniature painting, at a time when young people in Pakistan, under Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, had to behave very discreetly in public. She made the decision to major in miniature painting, working with only one other student under the strict methodology of the master teacher.

“It was a big thing to say, ‘I’m going to embrace something that’s already saddled with technique and ritual and a kind of copying and a certain language,’” says Sikander, who had to spend an entire year working just in ink before she was allowed to use color.

“I submitted myself to that,” she says. For four years she worked 18-hour days, almost always alone, to master the art of traditional miniature painting, learning how to apply layers of paint to build up luminous surfaces. Her final piece was The Scroll (1991–92), about a foot high and more than five feet long, in which she mapped out the rooms in her family home, using the genre conventions of stacking flattened-out spaces, and embellishing the architecture and the borders of the piece with painstaking pattern and detail. “You had to play by those rules,” Sikander says.

A recurring figure in the scroll is a young woman with long black hair, dressed in white, always painted from behind so that her face is not visible. She passes almost like an apparition through rooms filled with activity. At the end, she is seen at an easel painting herself. “She is an observer, who is not necessarily comfortable in that space,” says Sikander. “I left soon after.”

In 1992, after graduating, Sikander was invited to install her paintings for one day at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C. She flew on a standby ticket, carrying her miniature paintings in her suitcase, and decided to stay. Paintings in tow, she toured graduate schools all over the country, and in 1993, she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

At RISD, Sikander explored a new kind of freedom and simplification in her work. “I felt the work should be more about drawing,” she says. She experimented with quick gestures in ink on tissue paper and followed the suggestions that arose from the marks. Out of that process she developed a vocabulary of images, including a silhouette of a female body without head or arms, with tendrils flowing from her legs.

“It was about a form afloat and uprooted,” says Sikander, who felt a kinship with Ana Mendieta’s bodyworks. Her signature nomadic silhouette has reappeared in many finished works, sometimes like a specter feminizing the head of a Mughal courtier, sometimes joined with the multi-armed Hindu goddess brandishing an array of weapons and wearing a veil, like a cross-cultural female superhero.

Provenance the Invisible Hand, 2009, was made for an installation of objects Sikander selected from the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY, LONDON AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

After graduating from RISD in 1995, Sikander spent two years in the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. There she began to play with radical shifts of scale. “It was breaking out of the preciousness around my process and testing the viability of a form,” she says of enlarging an image from ten inches to ten feet, and “seeing whether it gains more momentum or maybe becomes more confrontational.”

Sikander’s breakout came in 1997, when she moved to New York and her paintings were shown at the Drawing Center and in the Whitney Biennial. “It was a really interesting time in the U.S. for me, before September 11, when things were looking outward more,” she says.

During the next few years she received a flurry of invitations to do site-specific work around the country. At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, she worked alongside Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen on her own huge ephemeral mural, which absorbed some of those artists’ street-art practices. At various places, including the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis in 1998 and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in 2001, she moved her wall installations into three dimensions by hanging layers of translucent tissue paper embellished with images, sometimes several feet deep, in front of the mural, thus veiling or blurring its appearance as viewers moved through the space.

“I hate the word, but there was a prevailing ‘multiculturalism’ going on in the 1990s,” she says. “That timing was personally wonderful because there was such a focus on exploring identity.” That focus helped bring attention to her paintings early on, but it eventually became a limitation, particularly in the post–September 11 climate, when her work was seen primarily through the lens of her identity as a Pakistani and a Muslim woman.

An officer of the East India Company appears in a Mughal court in a still from the HD video animation The Last Post, 2010.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY, LONDON AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

“I strive for the open-ended,” Sikander says. She has an acute understanding of the complex relationship between her homeland and her adopted country, where she has settled with her husband, who is a chemist, and their young son. While Sikander’s work isn’t overtly political, the instability and flux of her imagery, which often incorporates various kinds of weaponry and martial music, in some way reflects the cultural tensions and misrepresentations between East and West, as well as the potential for transformation.

Sikander made her first animation, a natural extension of her interest in layering, during a 2001 residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. She was working on a miniature painting and decided to scan in Photoshop each change she made to document the metamorphosis of the work. She hung the painting facing its looped animated version, which would perfectly mirror the painting for a fleeting second, in an installation called Intimacy.

“The foundation of my animations and all my work is drawing,” says Sikander, who continues to generate her projections from scans of drawn imagery. “The computer is storing and allowing me to move the layers around with amazing freedom and flexibility. The digital space really lets me push the movement.”

These days, she is caught up in the possibilities of projection as an immersive theater of light and shadow and sound. Currently, her giant projection that evokes the paradox of Shangri La is on view in “Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art” at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (through July 14). Last November, her animated video The Last Post (2010) filled the courtyard between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The piece deals with the British involvement in the opium trade with China.

“I was interested in the colonial lens, and the opium-based trade to China was happening by using India,” says Sikander, who collaborated with the Shanghai-born composer Du Yun on the dissonant score melding haunting voices with the sounds of static and explosions. Personally, Sikander has a soft spot for older Pakistani music and cheesy Bollywood songs. In her 2009 video Bending the Barrels, a Pakistani military marching band plays those songs interspersed with martial music.

Last November, Sikander was one of five artists (the others were Carrie Mae Weems, Cai Guo-Qiang, Kiki Smith, and Jeff Koons) to receive the inaugural Medal of Arts from the State Department through its Art in Embassies program. “For me, what they were recognizing was perhaps opening up the perception of the U.S.,” says Sikander. She is currently working with the program on a permanent piece for a new embassy under construction in Islamabad.

“The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan is going to be much more of a fortress than in some other countries,” the artist says, noting that embassy exhibitions are typically accessible only to the people who can enter the building. “For me, it’s a big deal to really push this boundary and make work that is going to be accessible to the outside space and be participatory as well as transparent.”

Sikander understands that she will face strong anti-American sentiment when she returns to Pakistan next year to install the piece. “They don’t understand why you are choosing to live here,” she says. “It can get very personal.”

Even as she is constantly expanding the directions taken with her world of imagery, she always returns to the intimate space of the miniature. “To me, the tenacity and simplicity of drawing is really the anchor,” she says. “It goes forward and back, sideways and back. I’m very cyclical.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.