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.
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Elusive Reality, 1989–2000
Watercolor and collage on tea-stained wasli paper
Collection of Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, New York
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: Working with another South Asian female and developing a collaborative practice, which allowed me to work with her where she choreographed many of pieces and performed in the drawings that I made. And then I brought her back into these small paintings, that dialogue that started to emerge was almost the strengthening of a South Asian feminine identity. So this is a time when being Asian American or Asian anything, one was questioning that paradox of being invisible while standing out. And what that broad racial category meant where so many different nations, ethnicities, classes, cultures, communities, languages had to vie to be recognized. So this work embodies that early period of developing a kind of collective identity with other South Asian artists.