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.