Shahzia Sikander received her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Pakistani-born and internationally recognized, Sikander's pioneering practice takes Indo-Persian miniature painting as a point of departure. She challenges the strict formal tropes of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions by experimenting with scale and media. Such media include animation, video, mural, and collaboration with other artists. Her process-based work is concerned with examining the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories. Her work helped launch a major resurgence in the Miniature Painting department in the Nineties at the National College of Arts in Lahore, inspiring many others to examine the miniature tradition.
The World is Yours, The World is Mine, 2014
Ink and Gouache on Paper
16 x 12"
The work can be seen as the artist’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, which spread around Africa and then to Europe and the United States. Her insistence on the anatomical aspect of the human body, with Africa in place of the heart, emphasizes how both it and the social body are made up of elements that interact with, and modify, each other.
Featured in Loving Blackness
In collaboration with professional mosaic artisan Stephen Miotto, Shahzia Sikander transforms the historical miniature painting into an autonomous, liberated form. By building an image through broken glass pieces, Sikander dismantles the preciousness of a rarefied object most often found in Western museum storage.
Featured in (ex)CHANGE
