This scene—an example of Sikander’s early interest in fantastic creatures—refers to the extraordinary sixteenth-century manuscript known as the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, now disassembled. Based on a leaf at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Sikander’s version focuses on the simurgh, a magical bird from Persian mythology. The simurgh symbolizes divinity in the twelfth-century Sufi allegorical tale The Conference of the Birds. In Islamic belief, birds in flight are associated with the ascension of the soul to a higher realm. Birds are rich in personal meaning for Sikander, who frequently equates them with imagination.

In these two compositions that preserve the format of manuscript illustrations and its decorative framing, Sikander portrays her friend Mirrat. In Mirrat I, she appears at Lahore Fort, a citadel in the capital city. Mirrat II shows her in an empty Sikh haveli, a historical home abandoned after the partition of India and Pakistan. The repetition of the figure suggests the passage of time—a traditional device in Mughal paintings. Sikander adapted the manuscript trope of the waiting woman by depicting Mirrat with a range of nuanced, contemplative expressions.

In this composition, her NCA thesis, Sikander depicted herself within a house inspired by her teenage home and rendered in a style that references Safavid painting traditions. “I am a floating ghostlike presence in every chapter or segment,” she said, “privy to the unfolding narrative while functioning as a channel through which an observer can access and navigate the painting. My diaphanous moving and morphing form is rendered in white gouache, and one can never see my face. I was making a statement on the restlessness of youth and the quest for identity. The claiming of the freedom for the female body in the domestic setting.” Although the portrayal is informed by a range of traditions, everything about The Scroll—its subject, format, setting, and details—was newly imagined. Painted over a year and a half, this was a breakthrough work not just for Sikander but also for the viability of manuscript painting traditions for contemporary practice.

In this more abstract version of The Scroll, Sikander refers to the tradition of the Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark scrolls. She incorporates bark into the painting, inscribing its materiality with light and form to extract a psychological dimension from the space. The activity in this series of vignettes is visually linked yet mysterious. Seen through windows and mirrors, the figures depicted feel hidden. At the center of the composition a woman lies on the ground, seemingly shattered by the bark and the house itself.

Sikander made this drawing as an exercise in traditional manuscript painting, employing the practice passed on to her by Bashir Ahmad, her professor at the NCA. The method starts with preparing the paper. Dampened cotton-fiber sheets are layered together with wheat-starch paste and a preservative. After the paper is pressed and dried, both sides are burnished with a sea shell, creating a smooth, luminous surface. For this work, the paper was also stained with several applications of tea. Using a brush fitted with only a few hairs, Sikander carefully outlined the image. She then applied layers of transparent wash and gold leaf. Like several other works in the exhibition, this painting was completed over a number of years—typical of Sikander’s process then and now.

This full-color painting was likely completed while Sikander was teaching at the NCA, as an example to show students. Once the paper had been prepared and the design transferred to the sheet, watercolor was carefully added using a dry brush. In this technique, called pardakht, the painting’s color is built up through many layers of quick, short brushstrokes, adeptly and meditatively applied with a minimum of pigment to avoid disrupting the delicate surface. The richness and depth achieved by this method is noticeable throughout the sheet, even in the white cloth.

This painting is based on a Safavid work— dated to seventeenth-century Iran—in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which Sikander copied from a reproduction. Although copying historical examples was part of the training at the NCA, students had little access to original works: due to the legacy of colonialism, most South and Central Asian manuscript illustrations now reside in Western museums. “My first visual encounter with miniature painting was with its facsimile,” Sikander recalled. “But even in printed reproductions, the inherent eroticism and beauty of the works captivated my imagination and challenged my assumptions.”

Sikander’s appreciation of language is expressed in her work through the wit of titles and her incorporation of script. In this example, the calligraphy of horses in motion was inspired by her childhood experience of reciting and memorizing the Quran in Arabic before understanding it in Urdu or English. “The ritual was to first get acquainted with the aural and visual before the meaning. It resulted in this amazing visual memory where the beauty of the Arabic script superseded everything else.”

This unfinished panel was part of a fiftyfoot mural Sikander was commissioned to make for a New York law firm. The image’s powerful iconography suggests female resilience and potency. According to Sikander, “the referents are manifold: the Jewish Shekhina, or Saqueena in Quranic parlance—the feminine complement to the masculine divine—and the chthonic mother goddesses of the Indus Valley.” The hovering female avatar holds implements of both defense (weapons) and justice (a scale). After 9/11, the figure was misunderstood as referring to violence rather than inner strength. When asked to change it, Sikander instead withdrew from the commission.

Sikander enjoys collaborating with like-minded artists. In this early example, the pastel monotype ground and central figure are the work of Donnamaria Bruton, a RISD professor who was Sikander’s close friend. As painters and women of color, they shared concerns about the white art world and patriarchal societies. This monstrous family-like grouping may reflect the malicious societal attitudes toward accomplished, ambitious women.

The movement of Sikander’s brush, fully loaded with white gouache, is palpable in this depiction, yet the figural or architectural form itself remains ambiguous. The top portion, a face covering for a shuttlecock burka, is most clearly articulated. The haunted image responds to the Orientalist obsession with the veil in the Western imagination: Is it perforated armor, a shelter, a mask, or a shell? According to Sikander, “Housed is about the constraints of escaping an imprisoning representation. The cage-like form has a door, and a pink heart lurks inside. This painting tapped into my anxiety of being boxed into a stereotype on behalf of a culture or a religion.”

This is one of the earliest works that combined Sikander’s new gestural vocabulary with the precision of traditional manuscript painting. She freely applied gouache to teastained wasli paper, joining abstract shapes with what could be seen as a multilimbed creature or a shredded veil with an embedded eye. The color white references the ground layer to which color pigments are added in manuscript painting. Below, the delicately rendered, spiral-horned antelope could have come out of a manuscript illustration. Both creatures emphasize the gaze. Sikander asks, “Where lies the power, in the eye of the beholder or in the art itself?”

This double female representation exemplifies Sikander’s use of redrawing, reorienting, embellishing, and recontextualizing to arrive at new interpretations. Rendered here as a deity and its avatar, both with looping, “self-nourishing roots,” this figure would become an iconic image in Sikander’s lexicon. The figures are presented in conversation with each other: one vertical, active, buoyant, and light; the other horizontal, passive, grounded, and dark. The liquidity of the ink on the slick paper created an unusual mottled pattern that resembles skin.

Self-Rooted is one of Sikander’s earliest works to employ layered tracing paper—note the vertical lines showing through from the sheet below. The strategy would soon be central to her practice.

Sikander has described the genesis of Dislocation at length: “Forms like these sprung forth from my resisting the racial straitjacketing I encountered in the 1990s in America. The assumptions that were projected on to me about who I was or what I represented felt not just unfair but alien. Becoming the other, the outsider, through the prevalent and polarizing dichotomies of East-West, Islamic-Western, Asian-White, oppressive-free, led to an outburst of iconography of fragmented and severed bodies, androgynous forms, armless and headless torsos, and self-rooted, floating half-human figures. They refused to belong, to be fixed, to be grounded, or to be stereotyped.”

In this work begun in Providence and reworked in Houston, Sikander used thin washes over areas of figuration to conflate bodies with the landscape. Female forms, in guises from comical to dark, resist categorization. “I was responding to my inability to locate Brown South-Asian representation in the feminist space in 1990s art-history books,” the artist recalled. “The monolithic category ‘third-world feminism’ felt offensive and limiting while it also pointed out white feminism’s blind spots and exclusions.”

This work records the first time Sikander boldly painted over one of her meticulously crafted traditional compositions. Sunlike red flames extend to the sheet’s edges, creating a new image that feels both celebratory and destructive, drawing attention to and obliterating the central couple. The gesture, according to Sikander, “shatters the trope of ‘ideal love’ from within the Indian painting vernacular. The stock characters of the Lovers on Horseback (here from the celebrated story of Baz Bahadur and Rupmati) become the site for rupture, a destabilizing of the motif of heterosexual love itself.”

In this work, a vigorously marked pastel monotype by Donnamaria Bruton serves as the base for Sikander’s own graffiti-like, emotional response to one of Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinances, introduced when she was ten. Unmarried women victimized by rape or accused of adultery were threatened with public lashings, as intimated at the center of this image. Deformed bodies and coiled designs resembling ovaries or watchful eyes surround the spectacle.

The pendulum was an apt symbol for Sikander, representing the nuanced spectrum of constantly shifting interpretations she encourages in her work. Some of the new vocabulary she developed in Houston revolved around signifiers of identity, especially hairstyle and clothing, as she questioned the stereotypes associated with them. Here, a self-portrait with an elaborate coiffure and a high collar masking her face functions as the pendulum’s weight. Sikander was exploring how outer appearances have historically been used to control and contain women.

Circles featured increasingly in Sikander’s lexicon in Houston, along with the griffin, an eagle-lion hybrid from Greek myth. “Under Alexander the Great, the Hellenic world extended to the Indian region of Punjab,” Sikander explains, “making the griffin a remnant from an earlier period of colonialization. I was connecting the griffin to the chalawa, a Punjabi term for a small farm animal that is now disappearing due to the region’s urbanization. The chalawa is a ghost. In my usage, it’s somebody who is so swift and transient, you can’t pin down who they are. I am identifying with the chalawa, resisting the routinely confronted categories: ‘Are you Muslim, Pakistani, artist, painter, Asian, Asian American, or what?’”

Sikander explains this painting’s layered commentary on gender and religion: “The notion of the veil, despite its cliché, persists in defining the Muslim female in the West. This protagonist appears to be a veiled female, yet on close inspection one can see that the stock character is a male polo player common to South and Central Asian manuscript illustrations. Painting over the male figure with chalky white lines was my way to make androgyny the subject. One could read it as a comment on patriarchal, colonial, and imperial histories. It was also a means of tracing my own relationship with the largely male-dominated lineage of manuscript painting.”

A lotus floats over the central figure in this composition and acknowledges the umbilical cord as the literal life force of the mother. This multilayered avatar gives form to the heterogeneity of South Asia, which includes Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and Christian cultures. “The central character’s attempt to pin down with its one foot the ghostlike female suggests the paradox of rootedness,” Sikander explains. “In a place like Houston, with its multiple immigrant narratives and nationalisms, the Uprooted Order series addressed the fallacy of assimilation versus foreignness.”

Sikander’s ghostly figure merges in this work with Radha, a Hindu goddess and a gopi (consort of the god Krishna). Radha is often depicted in Hindu iconography as the god’s preferred lover. Here, however, Sikander presents Radha as an independent and powerful deity in her own right, excluding Krishna from the picture. A nude figure crouches at Radha’s legs and she holds to her chest a chalawa, a creature that typically cannot be confined.

By placing Radha on a lotus—a pedestal for many male deities in religions across Asia—Sikander shifts power to the female in all her multiplicity. The hand gesture illustrated at top is the yoni mudra, used to summon the energy of creation.

Sikander’s work often reimagines familiar figures to locate new interpretations and tell richer stories. She explains that this image could represent “the transmutation of the Hindu gods Krishna and Vishnu, an inversion of the Greek snake-haired Medusa, or the Greek hero Heracles with Krishna (being linked to the mythologies of the serpent monsters Hydra and Kaliya).” As in many of the works in her Uprooted Order series, Sikander presents tradition not as a static notion, but as “alive—a space of unexpected juxtapositions.”

Enthroned and dressed in red, Sikander floats in a bubble above a painting she found in a market in Houston’s Little India neighborhood. Perhaps in a nod to her new Texas home, she seems to lasso some unseen desire lying outside her sphere.

This work is one from a series of six collages, each using as its base a traditional manuscript painting made for tourists. Sikander overlaid the paintings with photographs taken in an installation she had mounted at Project Row Houses, a community revitalization project and art space. The series was part of her continued experiment in disrupting traditional narratives.

Sikander acknowledges that she is driven by “an urgent reexamining of colonial and imperial stories of race and representation.” The many heads and circles in this work suggest the many lenses through which the artist or the viewer (who is the I eyeing in her title?) could, as Sikander says, “question the neat and tidy classification systems that control and maintain social structures.”

In Houston, Sikander was deeply involved in Project Row Houses, a housing and arts organization in the Third Ward, a predominantly African American neighborhood. This painting celebrates the organization with an upside-down portrait of its cofounder, the artist Rick Lowe, surrounded by various recontextualized images and icons. Sikander explains, “I wanted to counter derogatory representations of blackness in the medieval West—as seen in the silhouetted figures above the shields—through my construction of the armorial seal with the row houses. I also wanted to address politicized contemporary representations of the veil, and to reclaim positive representation for both. I am reimagining these entrenched and contested historical symbols by bringing them into conversation with overlapping diasporas.”

Barely contained within the decorative border of this painting is a fanciful cast of characters brought together from several different narratives. The biblical story of the serpent is reimagined here as a monkey tempting Eve to take a bite of the forbidden fruit. Eve is posed as Venus in Botticelli’s iconic painting The Birth of Venus, with the crocodile lying in her shell. Sikander’s use of animals to convey human traits is grounded in a collection of fables in the Persian illustrated manuscript tradition, Kalila wa-Dimna—itself a translation of the Panchatantra, an Indian fable collection written around the third century. Its story of the relationship between a crocodile and a monkey who lives in an apple tree is also referenced here.

Cinderella’s prince holds her slipper at center while a powerful veiled heroine takes control above as a reimagined Red Riding Hood. Sikander explains, “European fairy tales, which carry deeply entrenched gender bias, were part of my childhood storybooks in Pakistan. When I started examining manuscript painting as a young adult, the passive depictions of women often perturbed me. I wanted to make female protagonists who were proactive, playful, confident, intelligent, and connected to the past in imaginative ways”

This work’s title is drawn from a song in the popular 1993 Bollywood film Khalnayak (The villain). In the scene in which the song plays, two women sensuously dance together while a man observes them. In Sikander’s response to the scene, the male figure has been left out.

This piece was created for the New York Times Magazine feature “Old Eyes and the New: Scenes from the Millennium, Reimagined by Living Artists,” and was published in the September 1999 issue. The two central figures hold between them a piece of American currency inscribed with a quote from the Quran: “Which, then, of your Lord’s blessing do you both deny?” The surrounding figures speak to the shifting global alliances between Muslim leaders and American empire and capital. According to Sikander, “The 1990s was about war, coalitions, alternating friends and foes, imposed sanctions, debts forgiven, and human rights brushed under the carpet as America flexed its military muscle around the world. This work took this history into account, and I proposed that American policy in Islamic countries would become a defining issue in the new millennium.”

The portraits are, clockwise from upper left: Anwar Sadat; Menachem Begin; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional music; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan; Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, president of Pakistan; Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan; Malcolm X; Salman Rushdie; Nawal el Saadawi, feminist writer and physician, spokeswoman for the status of women in the Arab world; King Hussein; King Faisal; Asma Jahangir, Pakistani human rights lawyer and social activist; Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian nation; Ayatollah Khomeini; Saddam Hussein.

This repertoire of forms and figures emerged during a period when Sikander was creating fifty to one hundred fast, gestural ink drawings each week. Suggestive forms were later given definition and supplied with appendages, typically using a marker pen. The resulting characters—often female, sometimes androgynous, sometimes monstrous—repeatedly enter her work, frequently as a collection of alter egos. According to Sikander, the figures address “the lack of female artists represented in art history and the art world and the misogyny women encounter in almost all spheres of work and life. The act of drawing became about converting erasure into opportunity through wit and candor.”

This scene is a restaging of the painting Jahangir Receives Prince Khurram from the imperial Mughal manuscript Padshahnama (Book of emperors), now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Using the durbar hall as a compositional device, Sikander centers two self-portraits flanking a subway map, with rooftop water tanks in the top margin further signaling a New York City setting. In the lower register, courtiers from the historical painting—now wearing masks—gather, perhaps as witnesses of the past. Presiding at center is the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Sikander sees this deity as nonbinary and a symbol of multitude, with the ability to look in all directions and possess any form. She was intrigued with these chameleonlike powers and with masking as a metaphor for the many sides—some unseen—of any narrative.

Two female figures meet at the center of this work. The seated woman is inspired by Deccani painting traditions that originated in Central India in the 1500s. The overlaid, upside-down portrait is of Sharmila Desai, an Indian dancer with whom Sikander worked closely in New York. Desai sometimes performed in spaces installed with Sikander’s drawings. Sikander photographed the dances and then incorporated select postures into her paintings.

The array of archetypes portrayed here reveals the range of sources that Sikander looked to as she celebrated female sensuality and desire. Her central self-portrait with ram’s horns conjoins fragmented statues inspired by the Roman goddess Venus and a South and Southeast Asian celestial dancer. Above, two images of destruction threaten this scene of unrestrained pleasure: a fighter jet, which Sikander added in the aftermath of 9/11, and a winged, hybrid creature that seems to shoot fire from its hands.

The foundation for this work is Ascension of Solomon, a Safavid painting from the early 1500s now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC. Sikander disrupts the notion of sovereignty by removing King Solomon and handing the empty seat of power to her Indian and Greek female protagonists, who share or vie for control.

At center left in this work is an Indian celestial dancer modeled on a sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dancer flirtatiously entwines herself around a figure taken from the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist painting An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, by Agnolo Bronzino. Sikander created this pairing in response to Partha Mitter’s 1977 book Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, which points to the role of cultural stereotypes in the European perception of Asia. At right is another pair of figures, sourced from Greco-Roman and Indo-Persian traditions. They stand arm in arm beside a two-headed creature, reinforcing multiplicity and suggesting the closeness and overlap of histories and cultures.

The small female characters portrayed here derive from gopis, female cowherds and devotees of Krishna. Depicted from the waist up, they seem to be bathing, as they are often shown in Indian paintings. Large shadowy creatures—vaguely human, somewhat phallic— protect and contain the gopis, while bats or birds disperse from the center of the image. On close inspection, these flying forms are the hair of the gopis, detached and given life as a new symbol that will populate and animate Sikander’s work.

These uncanny forms interpret an array of objects, including swords, vessels, cannons, amulets, and masks—the types of images that might feature in Western coffee-table books on Islamic and Indian art. Sikander’s representations transform the inanimate objects into human-animal hybrids, imbuing them with agency. Her approach, she explains, was “an inventive and ironic play on the colonial histories of dispersing, rupturing, archiving, cataloguing, and institutionalizing art and artifacts of native cultures.” The distinct pattern created by the coagulation of ink on the sheets suggests reptile skin, ideal for rendering these subjects.

This playful landscape scene features the female cowherds and devotees of Krishna known as gopis (also seen in several other paintings in the exhibition). Freed from previous restrictions, they seem ready to take on the world. At left are their scooters—not that they need them, as they seem capable of flying. They only have traffic signals to stop them.

Sikander returned to the same Persian painting here that was the base for Sly Offering (on display nearby). Painted just as the United States was ramping up its response to the 9/11 attacks, No Fly Zone imbues the monstrous protagonists of Sikander’s early vocabulary with new political relevance. As scholar Sadia Abbas has noted, the empty throne in this painting—one of Sikander’s favorite motifs of the early 2000s—“marks a crisis of postcolonial sovereignty in an era of revived imperialism.” The jets and angels clad in red, white, and blue wings make clear the central role played by the United States.

The towers and aircraft in this painting call to mind the 9/11 attacks. The towers also suggest oil derricks, possible referencing the United States’ dependence on foreign oil, which was brought into question during President Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq. Heraldry links present-day policies to colonial- era exploitation. The large purse-like form is a lingam casket, which holds an amulet. The spiderweb is a reference to the one in a popular tale that shielded Muhammad from persecutors as he hid in a cave. The lush landscape with animals both nurtured and preyed on—copied from a Mughal manuscript painting—is the foundation of this composition filled with references to protection and destruction.

At the center of this painting, a multiarmed, uprooted female tries to hold on to all she desires—a chalawa (symbolizing impermanence), a turtle (symbolizing endurance), a floating child, a portrait of a woman, and a self-portrait of the artist. Sikander painted this figure over a large portrait of a trickster drawn by the Houston-based artist David McGee. All of the faces have been partly obscured, keeping racial and cultural identities shifting. As an immigrant, Sikander was questioning the prevalence of hyphenated identities in America and who is recognized as a citizen.

Returning to a technique she first developed at RISD, Sikander created many multipart works, such as this one, on paper coated with a combination of clay, gesso, acrylic, and patching compound. More stable than tracing paper, this surface allowed her to precisely delineate the forms. Varying the amount of red clay provided a color range that Sikander likened to flesh tones. This textured, absorbent surface coaxed new characters and narratives from Sikander’s imagination. Tumbling, floating, and flying, the interacting figures are engaged in exuberant movement.

A detail from A Garden of Heavenly Creatures, a sixteenth-century Safavid painting in the Freer Gallery of Art collection, forms the backdrop for this work. In Sikander’s intervention, the garden has been overrun with an American presence. Globes featuring maps of the United States appear at center, an eagle reigns at top, and the angels have red, white, and blue wings.

This painting, created for the animation SpiNN, includes several scenes of gopis in an act of rebellion. The gopis join together to create the beast that Krishna rides into the durbar hall. Once inside, they take over the space. Traditional Indian manuscript paintings typically feature only a single prominent gopi, Radha, the favored consort of Krishna. As Sikander multiplies the gopis’ numbers, she gives them all the agency of Radha, speaking to the power of a collective feminine space.

In the late 1990s, the 2000s, and occasionally since, Sikander created installations of layered tracing-paper drawings, most often in combination with wall drawings, as a counterpoint to her painting practice. The intention was to use fluid, spontaneous gestures that involved her whole body and amplified her invented motifs. This large-scale work requires a different kind of labor, skill, and pace than her smaller, intricate compositions, but she still sees it as in dialogue with classical traditions. Sikander is also attracted to the openness of the piece: “There is no intention to hide anything,” she explains. “Everything is very visible; the paper is very transparent. It flows, it moves. All marks, including any flaws, become a part of the piece, which has no borders and can expand in any direction, marking a site that is unstable and multivalent.”