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.”
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II, 1994/95
Ink on sketchbook pages
Collection of the artist
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: This is a time when I was reading and re-reading many texts by authors such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Carter, Fahmida Riaz, Parveen Shakir, expanding my grasp of female poets and feminist forms, and in turn, exploring language from specific points in places of women's narratives. I was really keen to develop a lexicon of forms that could be both inventive and witty and could open up stories around gender and sexuality, forms that would sort of emerge from within, almost as if I had regurgitated them after perusing classical and historical South Asian sculptures and paintings. So for me, this process of locating a relationship to tradition was not to mimic, but to find a language that was connected to the research that I was doing, connected in a very natural manner. So I was kind of asking, "What is originality? How does one create something new?" The world is full of mysteries. There's always going to be a variety of distances between the real and the imagined. So I'm interested in history, I'm interested in politics, but I'm also interested in the dynamism of form, form as something alive and in conversation with its time, space, and language.