HOUSTON — Shahzia Sikander’s exhibition Extraordinary Realities, at the moment on perspective at the Museum of Good Arts, Houston, is a complicated organism. Much like Sikander’s artworks themselves, each individual home bursts with an array of themes in different mediums. The exhibition covers the to start with 15 yrs of the artist’s job. Ranging from regular manuscript paintings to tracing paper drawings to online video projection, the parts on display screen are at the moment intricate and expansive, historical yet carefully modern.
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1969, Sikander received international consideration in the 1990s as she pioneered new methods to miniature portray, recontextualizing regular representations of race, gender, and countrywide id. The first space of Extraordinary Realities showcases a collection of comprehensive watercolors in the model of Islamic and South Asian manuscript paintings from the 16th by 19th generations. Packed with existence, these performs difficulty the category of “miniature” that this creative practice was assigned by European tradesmen in the 1700s, resisting their compact sort.
Some of Sikander’s miniatures expose a connection to Houston. A former Core Fellow at the MFAH’s Glassell College, she has a special marriage to the town. “Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings” (1989–97) centers a portrait of legendary nearby artist Rick Lowe, who co-founded the business Job Row Residences in Houston’s principally African American 3rd Ward. A sequence of linked images — shields, animals, and a smaller portray of the row homes by themselves — types a kind of holy iconography around Lowe aimed at countering racist depictions of Blackness in classical European art. Sikander maintains that she is inspired by “an urgent reexamination of colonial and imperial tales of race and representation.” This re-envisioning is enacted right here by the use of circles, intended to symbolize diverse “lenses” to see the globe.
According to an essay that scholar Gayatri Gopinath wrote for Sikander’s exhibition catalogue, the artist’s use of a classic medium refuses neat classes of gender and nationhood, flipping assumptions of the historic earlier as the web-site of cultural authenticity. Gopinath asserts that Sikander’s transform to traditional types is “radically anti-nostalgic in that she the two makes use of and deconstructs the idiom of Indo-Persian miniature painting in purchase to imagine a distinct existing and potential.”
Gopinath goes on to argue that Sikander’s recurring graphic of a floating, headless girl with roots for feet exemplifies an aesthetic of queer diaspora that elides effortless definitions of home and place. In the book Islamic Art: Earlier, Current, Upcoming (2019), Sikander explained this root-baring, floating feminine determine as “self-nourishing,” a type of different deity that “refuses to belong, to be fixed, to be grounded, to be stereotyped.” This deity can be in all places at the moment, and eludes any described identity.
Themes of queer wish keep on in Sikander’s painting “Cholee Kay Peechay Kiya? Chunree Kay Neechay Kiya?” (What Is under the Blouse? What Is below the Gown?) (1997), which pictures a multi-limbed, gender-fluid determine. As Gopinath argues, the piece nods to a scene of queer longing in the 1993 Bollywood film Khalnayak in which two women seductively dance together. This work, like lots of many others of Sikander’s, each conceals and reveals queer longing in plain sight. This intricately rendered play with visibility powerfully concerns what has traditionally been regarded as legible wish.
The second home of Incredible Realities focuses on the operate Sikander produced immediately after she moved to New York in 1997. She started to experiment with new mediums and tactics, this kind of as layered tracing paper drawings and clay-coated paper drawings. In the wake of 9/11, she even further navigated the questions world wide economics, class, race, gender, and capitalism. These functions refer to common iconography both equally from Pakistan and the West: “Mind Games” (2000), a retelling of Jangir Gets Prince Khurran from the Mughal manuscript Padshahnama, functions two figures on the New York subway and a nonbinary deity that has the electric power to see in all instructions.
The exhibition finishes with Sikander’s operatic online video projection Parallax (2015), a 15-minute, a few-channel set up comprised of hundreds of her lush drawings and watercolors, originally created for the 2013 Sharjah Bienniale. In the mesmerizing earth of Parallax, it is tough to convey to irrespective of whether the viewer is getting into into an idyllic fantasy or a dystopia tangerine and ruby petals slide throughout a shifting landscape of rock, forest, and concrete. Hen-like sorts plunge into an oily ocean. A skeletal determine dissolves into a swarm of black insects. These shifting animations evoke the landscape of the Persian Gulf, which Sikander skilled driving as a result of the region, and mirror the constant cultural and historic motion of the Strait of Hormuz. As the relationship place among the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz one-way links quite a few geographic locations and is essential for oil provide. Among Parallax’s core photos are the tresses of a feminine sort, spinning and entangling, looming across an industrial backdrop, a comment on woman resilience in the experience of world-wide capitalism.
In a retrospective scarcely containable within just its a few rooms, Amazing Realities gathers collectively themes of woman multiplicity, queer need, capitalist exploitation, and decolonial aesthetics. Turning to standard artwork methods, Sikander forces the kind, be it manuscript painting, online video set up, or drawing, to bend to her interpretation of these problems. On equally a visual and an ideological degree she demonstrates that they are undeniably connected.
Shahzia Sikander: Amazing Realities continues at the Museum of High-quality Arts, Houston (5601 Most important Street, Houston, Texas) through June 5. The exhibition was organized by the RISD Museum and offered in collaboration with the Museum of High-quality Arts, Houston, and curated by Jan Howard.
