Promiscuous Intimacies

Shazia Sikandar: The two protagonists that you see in this sculpture are actually in my other paintings also, especially Pleasure Pillars and Intimacy. So you can recognize them there, but I wanted to call them out of the paintings and develop them into sculptures to see what would happen when these female bodies bear the symbolic weight of communal identities from across multiple temporal and geographic terrains. So I first sketched out these female characters in 2000 for a banner for MoMA when I worked with the curator, Fereshteh Daftari. At that time, I was just interested in art histories, classicism, and ethnocentric reactions to Indian art. But I was also making a point by entangling mannerism, the anti-classical impulse within the Western tradition alongside Indian art, both as accomplice witnesses of a one-sided history. But in 2017, I had the opportunity to be part of the New York City Mayor's Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. And during that process, when I was hearing differing public opinions around public monuments, the complicated histories, a sort of a historical reckoning, and these tensions between communities regarding representation, at that time I felt that if I ever make a sculpture, I would make an anti-monument. And that's how I see this work, that it's not glorifying the past, but it is also evoking non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as foreign and inauthentic. And I want my sculpture to challenge the viewer to imagine a different past, present, and future where tradition, culture, identity can be seen as impure, heterogeneous, and unstable, kind of always in process where taken for granted boundaries and art, historical, and national temporal boundaries can be disrupted.