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.”
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Cycles and Transitions, 1995–96
Watercolor and gouache on tea-stained wasli paper
Collection of Alton and Emily Steiner
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: My journey as a visual artist, to explore the personal as political, had already started in Pakistan. And now when I was in the US in the early 90s, this distancing from home started the process of self-actualization. I was holding onto my link with manuscript painting. I wanted to continue exploring it to see how it could yield new narratives and languages. And at the same time, many people were not familiar with the history of manuscript painting. So there was a little bit of this burden that I carried in the MFA program because my work was engaging with traditions that did not necessarily sit at the center of Western art history. So often, the work would be glossed over and interpreted very narrowly in terms of my biography. So this painting is more of a gesture of questioning and resisting the straightjacketing that often artists of color encounter. Who I was, what I represented became limiting constructs. So I was not making autobiographical works, but I wanted to talk about broader issues, about the complicated history of colonial legacies, orientalist constructs, lack of South Asian feminist representations, especially in the 1990s art history books. So when you see these forms, some are held in silos and some are bleeding through the gesture of ink, there's a lot of mixing and merging happening, a form of dislocation that starts to occur in this work.