This work’s title is drawn from a song in the popular 1993 Bollywood film Khalnayak (The villain). In the scene in which the song plays, two women sensuously dance together while a man observes them. In Sikander’s response to the scene, the male figure has been left out.
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Cholee Kay Peechay Kiya? Chunree Kay Neechay Kiya? (What Is under the Blouse? What Is under the Dress?), 1997
Watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale- on-Hudson, New York
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: The title of this work references a song from a very famous Bollywood film. This was such a staple song in the 1990s. It was a mega hit song and also being performed at the parties and drag performances in queer spaces. So I didn't really start by creating an illustration of that song. It's just that the parallels started to emerge later. And when I was in conversation with the gender and sexuality scholar Gayatri Gopinath, who has written a essay in the book related to this exhibition, we started talking about how a queer optic can be used as a lens on reading so much of my work. And this reading that she brings to the work is really interesting to me as well, where she sees this gender and sexuality outside a conventional visual logic of secrecy and disclosure, invisibility and visibility. There is the body. The female body in this painting seems to exist in excess of gender itself. It sprouts limbs, lotuses, it endlessly repeats, doubles, multiplies, and then circles back on itself.