A lotus floats over the central figure in this composition and acknowledges the umbilical cord as the literal life force of the mother. This multilayered avatar gives form to the heterogeneity of South Asia, which includes Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and Christian cultures. “The central character’s attempt to pin down with its one foot the ghostlike female suggests the paradox of rootedness,” Sikander explains. “In a place like Houston, with its multiple immigrant narratives and nationalisms, the Uprooted Order series addressed the fallacy of assimilation versus foreignness.”
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Uprooted Order, Series 3, No. 1, 1997
Watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Joseph Havel and Lisa Ludwig, 2003.728
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: What is being uprooted in this painting? This painting alludes broadly to the genre of Radha and Krishna, historical Indian paintings, except that there is no male in my work. I have removed the male deity, Krishna, to focus on the feminine and its empowering and hypnotic singular potential. The uprooted order transforms into the apparatus of power. So to begin, let me just share that while I was perusing Morgan's collections, I also came across a painting, which is on view in the vitrine outside the gallery. It's a work from 1825 called Krishna and Radha Beneath a Flowering Tree. There is some visual link between my work and the one from Morgan. In both the works, the female is balancing onto a blossomed branch. In this painting, while she is balancing, she's also pinning down with her foot a shadowy form in white, with looping feet and sort of wings. There are other iterations of this ghostlike creature at the top and left of the painting as if they are peeking into the painting itself, half inside, half outside. I was playing with paradoxes and exploring conflicting ideas to create tension and multivalence in my work. So there's sort of a dance happening between the idea of rootedness and being afloat, perhaps by choice.