Sikander explains this painting’s layered commentary on gender and religion: “The notion of the veil, despite its cliché, persists in defining the Muslim female in the West. This protagonist appears to be a veiled female, yet on close inspection one can see that the stock character is a male polo player common to South and Central Asian manuscript illustrations. Painting over the male figure with chalky white lines was my way to make androgyny the subject. One could read it as a comment on patriarchal, colonial, and imperial histories. It was also a means of tracing my own relationship with the largely male-dominated lineage of manuscript painting.”
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Who’s Veiled Anyway?, 1997
Watercolor and gouache on tea-stained wasli paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Drawing Committee, 97.83.1
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: I am not a fan of the broad categories such as Islam and the West, especially in contrast to each other. They remain opaque and polarizing, leading to frustrating conversations, hijacking people's imagination. Cliches about Muslim women, especially the stereotype of the veil, persist in Western history, literature, media. In the 1990s, I'd often experience the probing notion myself, especially when I wore my Pakistani clothes like the shalwar kameez with the scarf, seemingly Muslim by association. I wanted to respond, to raise questions from a variety of histories and representations, through exploring the writings of Fatima Mernissi, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon. The paradox of the veil took on a very deeply poignant platform. In my work, the idea is not about the object, but about unraveling the anxiety that it may foster. You see this protagonist... It could be read as an androgynous form. What you see is not what you expected. There's a male under the white line. The white line itself is like an editing tool for me. But I was also playing with Hélène Cixous' idea of the écriture féminine, often called white ink. The usage of white was also referencing the foundational element of the gadrang, the opaque color technique in miniature painting. White is used as the body for all colors. Using white paint as an editing tool to write with, literally and conceptually was also a play in this work on redaction and who gets to define the other in the collective imaginary.