Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity

 

The significant influence and adoption of Islamic art and culture in modern Western arts is immense. It is well known amongst the relevant acedemia (people in theknoe!) but is hardly explored, researched and/or presented at a broader scale. 

The exhibition below is therefore quite relevant and important in higlhigting and documenting this strong connection. 

The exhibition has 400 objects and ends September 22. Go and see it if you can! 

Source: DMA

Major Exhibition Exploring Cartier’s Inspirations from Islamic Art and Design Makes North American Premiere in Spring 2022 at Dallas Museum of Art

Major Exhibition Exploring Cartier’s Inspirations from Islamic Art and Design
Makes North American Premiere in Spring 2022 at Dallas Museum of Art

Co-organized by the DMA and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris,
in Collaboration with the Musée du Louvre and with the Support of Maison Cartier,
Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity Showcases over 400 Objects,
Including Iconic Cartier Pieces and Works of Islamic Art
from Local and International Collections

Exhibition Design Conceived by Renowned Studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Dallas, TX – Updated April 18, 2022 – In spring 2022, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) will be the sole North American venue for Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity, a major exhibition tracing inspirations from Islamic art and design, including from Louis Cartier’s exquisite collection of Persian and Indian art, on the creations of the Maison Cartier from the early 20th century to present day. Co-organized by the DMA and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre and with the support of Maison Cartier, the exhibition brings together over 400 objects from the holdings of Cartier, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), the Musée du Louvre, the Keir Collection of Islamic Art on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art, and other major international collections. Through strong visual juxtapositions and new scholarly research, the exhibition explores how Cartier’s designers adapted forms and techniques from Islamic art, architecture, and jewelry, as well as materials from India, Iran, and the Arab lands, synthesizing them into a recognizable, modern stylistic language unique to the Maison Cartier. Cartier and Islamic Art will make its US premiere in Dallas from May 14 through September 18, 2022, following its presentation at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, from October 21, 2021, through February 20, 2022.

Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity is co-curated by Sarah Schleuning, The Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the DMA; Dr. Heather Ecker, the former Marguerite S. Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz Curator of Islamic and Medieval Art at the DMA; Évelyne Possémé, Chief Curator of Ancient and Modern Jewelry at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and Judith Hénon, Curator and Deputy Director of the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The exhibition design is conceived by renowned studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), which is creating a contemporary display that offers enhanced opportunities for close looking and analysis of form. The Presenting Sponsor for the exhibition in Dallas is PNC Bank.

“For over a century, Cartier and its designers have recognized and celebrated the inherent beauty and symbolic values found in Islamic art and architecture, weaving similar elements into their own designs. This bridging of Eastern and Western art forms speaks exactly to the kinds of cross-cultural connections the DMA is committed to highlighting through our programming and scholarship,” said Dr. Agustín Arteaga, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “Not only does this exhibition present our audiences with the opportunity to explore Cartier’s dazzling designs, but it also spotlights the strength of our powerhouse Islamic Art and Decorative Arts and Design departments, as well as those of our colleagues at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Louvre.”

“The design strategies in this exhibition—motif, pattern, color, and form—reveal the inspirations, innovations, and aesthetic wonder present in the creations of the Maison Cartier. Focused through the lens of Islamic art, the designs reveal how the Maison migrates and manifests these styles over time, as well as how they are shaped by individual creativity,” said Sarah Schleuning.

Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity explores the origins of Islamic influence on Cartier through the cultural context of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the figure of Louis J. Cartier (1875–1942), a partner and eventual director of Cartier’s Paris branch, and a collector of Islamic art. Louis encountered Islamic art through various sources, including the major exhibitions of Islamic art in Paris in 1903 and 1912 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which were held to inspire new forms of modern design, and a pivotal exhibition of masterpieces of Islamic art in Munich in 1910. Paris was also a major marketplace for Islamic art and a gathering place of collectors. It was around this time that Cartier and his designers began to experiment with new modes of design, looking to Japanese textiles, Chinese jades, Indian jewelry, and the arts and architecture of the Islamic world to expand upon the “garland style” that had brought success to the house at the turn of the 20th century. Louis Cartier’s own collection of Persian and Indian paintings, manuscripts, and other luxury objects—reconstructed in this exhibition for the first time in nearly 80 years—also served as inspiration for these new designs, and together these influences would be essential to the development of a new aesthetic called “style moderne" and later “Art Deco” at Cartier.

Bringing together over 400 objects from the DMA’s own holdings and other major international collections, Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity presents a rare opportunity to encounter not only a wide array of iconic Cartier objects, but also their original sources of inspiration. The exhibition showcases works of Cartier jewelry and luxury objects alongside historical photographs, design drawings, archival materials, and works of Islamic art, including those displayed in the Paris and Munich exhibitions and in Louis’s own collection, as well as works bearing motifs that would become part of Cartier’s lexicon of forms. Additionally, digital technologies will offer insight into the creative process at the Maison, from an original source object to a motif, to its adaptation as a jewelry design, and finally to its execution in metal, stones, and organic materials.

Juxtaposing Cartier jewels, drawings, and archival photographs with examples of Islamic art that bear similar forms and ornaments, Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity illustrates the inspiration, adaptation, and recombination of motifs deriving from Islamic sources in Cartier’s design for jewelry and luxury objects. These include a range from geometric to naturalistic forms and Chinese designs (cloud collars and interlocking shapes) that were naturalized in the Islamic lands under the Mongol and Timurid rulers of the Middle East and India since the 13th century.

The exhibition also touches on the material and technical sources of inspiration derived from Louis’s youngest brother Jacques’ travels to India and Bahrain in the early 20th century. From these locales, and other neighboring regions, Cartier imported new materials to introduce into its work, including carved emeralds and other multicolored engraved gemstones. Discoveries gleaned from these travels spurred the use of novel color combinations drawing from Islamic sources, one of the most distinctive aspects of the Maison’s early 20th-century designs. They also inspired the use of new techniques, most notably Cartier’s signature Tutti Frutti style. From the 1920s onward, Islamic pieces themselves—such as enameled plaques, shards of pottery, stone amulets, textiles, or miniatures taken from paintings—were sometimes gathered in a stock called apprêts and incorporated into new Cartier creations.

The exhibition traces each of these stylistic developments, linking them to actual or probable Islamic source material and revealing the expertise of the jeweler’s eye in mediating forms and creating some of Cartier’s most renowned and recognizable styles today.

“PNC Bank has a legacy of investing in the communities we serve through broad support of the arts, as we understand and advocate for the economic, social and civic impacts a thriving arts and culture community brings to our city,” said Brendan McGuire, PNC regional president for North Texas. “The opportunity to continue our strategic partnership with the Dallas Museum of Art, as they create local access to globally renowned art, is fundamental to our work in this space and in North Texas.”

Shahzia Sikander in The New Yorker

How Shahzia Sikander Remade the Art of Miniature Painting

In “Extraordinary Realities,” the artist uses a once suppressed form to interrogate the modern world.

By Naib Mian

Source:  The New Yorker 

June 1, 2022

In 2019, two Persian paintings sold in a private-auction house, in London, for roughly eight hundred thousand pounds each. The paintings were illuminated manuscripts, or “miniature” paintings, and they belonged to the same book: a fifteenth-century edition of the Nahj al-Faradis, which narrates Muhammad’s journey through the layers of heaven and hell. The original book, once an artistic masterpiece, had been ripped apart, reduced to sixty lavish images. Bound, the manuscript was likely worth a few million pounds; dismembered, its contents have sold for more than fifty million.

The dismembering of manuscripts is part of a larger story, a tale of extractive patronage and the passage of empires. The term “miniature” is a colonial creation, a catchall category for a diverse array of figurative paintings that emerged in modern-day Iran, Turkey, and Central and South Asia. During imperial rule, most illuminated manuscripts were claimed by private collections and museums in Europe, where many still reside in storage, effectively erased. (In 1994, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran had to trade a de Kooning in order to repatriate part of a sixteenth-century manuscript.) The craft, too, was diminished. When colonial schools taught the “fine arts,” manuscript painting was neglected. Even after independence, Pakistan’s premier art academy, the National College of Arts, emphasized Western traditions.

By the time the artist Shahzia Sikander arrived at the N.C.A., in 1987, manuscript painting was seen as kitsch. But, on campus, Sikander was introduced to Bashir Ahmed, one of the few artists linked to the craft’s legacy. Ahmed had studied with Sheikh Shuja Ullah, the last in a family of Mughal court artists, and, in 1982, he had founded a two-year program in miniature painting, the first of its kind. Many saw Ahmed as an outré traditionalist, but Sikander sensed an opportunity to explore—and remake—a form ignored by the art world. She spent up to eighteen hours a day training in Ahmed’s small studio, learning everything she could about the form’s original methods, down to picking hair from a squirrel’s tail for one of her brushes. Shahzia Sikander, at the Sean Kelly gallery, in New York.Photograph by Farah Al Qasimi / NYT / Redux

The process of creating the paintings, which historically were commissioned to illustrate religious stories, scientific texts, poetry, tales, and imperial histories, was meticulous. Before illustration even began, the paper had to be made and prepared, the folios burnished and cut. Tea was applied to give the paper subtle layers of color. Artists would then sketch and outline their work, and pigment specialists would apply watercolor, building varying tones with tiny brushstrokes. Backgrounds and architectural spaces were decorated with arabesques, rhythmic designs meant to capture the beauty of nature and God’s creation. Using fine brushes made of only a few hairs, artists would then outline the final composition.

While immersed in her training, Sikander also began interrogating power—the way it shaped the world, and at whose expense. Growing up in the eighties, during Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship, she experienced a shift toward restrictions on freedom, the politicization of religion, and the policing of public life. At the same time, America’s military presence in the region was seeping into Pakistani culture, introducing anti-Communist propaganda and the valorization of war. As Sikander observed this complex political landscape, the art of miniature painting presented her with a frontier. Using a subjugated form that had been consigned to the past, she could try to depict the tensions of the present.“Intimacy,” 2001.

“Separate Working Things I,” 1993–95.

“Extraordinary Realities,” a retrospective of the first fifteen years of Sikander’s remarkable career, is now showing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, after stints at the Morgan Library, in New York, and the Rhode Island School of Design. To call Sikander a “miniaturist” would be reductive—she’s now an internationally renowned artist and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and her work in sculpture, animation, and mixed media is substantially featured in the show. But its primary story, moving from her formal training in Pakistan to her subsequent work in the United States, tackles her exploration of the manuscript tradition.

In the fall, I visited the show at the Morgan. The first work I encountered was Sikander’s thesis project, a five-foot-wide scroll that depicts an interpretation of her family home. Despite its scale, the work functions as a miniature, its sensual detail luring the viewer close. The walls of the house, the events that take place within it, and time itself unfold in a series of panels. Sikander’s autobiographical subject—a young, spectral figure dressed in white—weaves in and out of rooms and family gatherings, appearing in multiple places at once, as though defying time, space, and the restrictions of the domestic sphere. In the final panel, Sikander’s figure steps outside the home and into a garden, where she begins painting herself.

Detail from “The Scroll,” 1989–90.

Detail from “The Scroll,” 1989–90.

Sikander’s eye can turn inward, but much of her work addresses a Western gaze that perceives entire swaths of the world as “other.” After 9/11 and the subsequent American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, that gaze found a new fixation in the Muslim woman: a veiled object, oppressed and in need of liberation. Contemporary art’s engagement with the “Muslim world” involved a visual aesthetic that fetishized imagery of war and the Muslim woman’s body. Sikander resisted this, developing an iconography—severed, androgynous floating bodies—that pushed beyond the bounds of geography, nationality, and identity. In “Pleasure Pillars,” dancing Mughal and Rajput women surround the headless torsos of a South Asian sculpture and a European Venus. At the center, a self-portrait crowned in spiralling horns rests beneath two winged objects. One is a mythical beast that emits fire from its limbs; another is a technically drawn military aircraft, hovering in place. Sikander offers an expansive vision of femininity while exposing a threat of violence—a stark indictment of how the war on terror was justified, in part, by weaponizing the plight of women.

Sikander endows the components of her images with equal weight, reducing their essentializing power. Whereas much of the European artistic tradition centers naturalistic composition, focussing on shading, perspective, and a consistent light source, manuscript painters sought to depict the world through a minute execution of detail, articulating a field of figures with equal legibility. This approach was intended to overload the senses. Rather than mimic the human perspective, it offered a God’s-eye view, in which every object had an ideal form and shape in a codified visual lexicon. (Thus existed an “ideal” tree, an “ideal” horse, an “ideal” face.) The Timurid sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqara described this process as a stringing together of “pearls of meaning,” during which inherited shapes were enhanced, through the sumptuous application of dyes, paints, and gilding, with the “garb of adornment.” Every painting in Sikander’s canon is such a pearl, the meaning of which derives not only from its beauty but from its meditations on the manuscript tradition itself.

“Uprooted Order, Series 3, No. 1,” 1997.

“Prey,” 2002.

In “Prey,” Sikander plays with the imagery of a woodland hunt, a common scene in Persian paintings. What originally appears to be a God’s-eye view of a lush, teeming forest turns out to be an aerial perspective of war. Shadows of fighter jets replace the traditional human hunter of the genre, imbuing it with a modern perspective, and darkly changing the nature of the hunt itself. The scholar Sadia Abbas, in an introduction to the text accompanying the show, captures the irony of Sikander’s work: she transforms “the miniature, once thought to be evidence of the ‘East’s’ stasis and exclusion from modernity,” into a device that interrogates the global imprint of colonialism and capitalism. “SpiNN,” an animation whose title references CNN and the media’s power in shaping narratives, depicts a Mughal durbar, an imperial hall usually occupied by men and a regular subject of manuscript paintings. Gopis, or cow-herding girls, infiltrate the space. Their hair is abstracted into bird-like figures that swarm the frame, then dissolve, replaced by angels on the throne.

“Who’s Veiled Anyway?,” 1997.

“Hood’s Red Rider No. 2,” 1997.

Sikander’s anti-nostalgic relationship to the manuscript tradition allows her to both advance and deconstruct its idioms. In one series, she’s painted over meticulously crafted miniatures, evoking graffiti. In “Who’s Veiled Anyway?,” she challenges the form’s male-dominated imagery, covering a male polo player with a female silhouette and a trailing burqa. Her signal motif­—a headless woman—appears again, arranged in a multitude of ways: veiled, winged, hovering in the clouds, and jutting, phallus-like, from a horse.

Manuscript painting was never a static tradition—artists in the Persian world were influenced by the Byzantines, Arab bookmaking traditions, and Chinese figurative techniques—and Sikander often draws on cultural exchanges she’s experienced herself. In the early nineties, she spent time in Houston, and for a year she worked with Project Row Houses, a housing-and-arts community in the Third Ward. While sharing her artistic practice, learning from local Black artists, and exploring interests ranging from poetry to jazz, her iconography expanded. In “Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings,” she layers shields bearing row houses among Safavid arabesques. Behind a striking portrait of the artist Rick Lowe, a co-founder of Project Row Houses, silhouettes that critique negative depictions of Blackness and the Islamic veil float within a sea of symbols: a winged beast, a many-armed figure. These unexpected juxtapositions, which suggest the overlapping politicization of the Black body and the Muslim woman’s body, evoke binaries in order to dissolve them.

“Eye-I-ing those Armorial Bearings,” 1989–97.

The work of “Extraordinary Realities” is immense yet intimate. At a visual level, it overturns the dominant subjects of traditional manuscript painting, using pre-modern techniques to lodge arguments about gender, race, and political history. But, on a larger scale, it disrupts power in the art world itself. Sikander’s work signalled to a new generation of artists that a once marginalized form could be turned to fresh and interrogating ends. In Pakistan, one need only look at enrollment in N.C.A.’s miniature program, which had two students when it was founded. This year, it has forty-five.

Naib Mian is an editor and producer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was previously a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.

Khadim Ali in the prestigious Ocula Magazine

 Khadim Ali's Invisible Border Expands Tradition

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE
Source: Ocula 

In Conversation with

Liz Nowell

Brisbane, 20 May 2021

Khadim Ali. Courtesy Institute of Modern Art. Photo: Rhett Hammerton

Graduating from the National College of Arts in Lahore in 2003, 

Khadim Ali's practice initially focused on traditional miniature painting before 

expanding in media and scale.

Born in Quetta, Pakistan, and now based in Sydney, the artist's practice has attracted global acclaim for works that explore life in exile. At the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), the artist's exhibition Invisible Border (10 April–5 June 2021) is his largest in Australia to date, and explores the normalisation of war and the experiences of refugees through a phenomenal body of work, including the nine-metre-long tapestry Invisible Border 1 (2021), hand-woven by a community of Hazara men and women.

Khadim Ali, Invisible Border I (2020) (detail). Hand and machine embroidered, stitched and dye ink on fabric. 291 x 265 cm. Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Photo: Marc Pricop.

Ali's interest in tapestries developed soon after his parents' house in Quetta was destroyed by a car bomb. Amongst the rubble and debris that was left over, a collection of rugs remained perfectly intact, miraculously able to withstand the terror that was reigned upon the community. In this new large-scale tapestry work and the other work in this exhibition, Ali explores the impact of war, trauma, and displacement, drawing parallels from the book of The Shahnameh, Persian literature, current politics, and a whole range of sources, which he discusses in this conversation.

Khadim Ali, Invisible Border 1 (2020). Acrylic paint and dye, hand and machine embroidery stitched on fabric. 210 x 900 cm. Collection: Sharjah Art Foundation. Exhibition view: Invisible Border, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (10 April–5 June 2021). Courtesy Institute of Modern Art. Photo: Marc Pricop.

Roots and Wings - How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist

"Art is how we learn to tell stories about our truths and how we negotiate a place in the world for future generations." Shahzia Sikander

How a Children’s Book about Art Took Flight

The artist, the author, and the illustrator behind Roots and Wings: 

How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist, share the story of its making.

Hanna Barczyk, Amy Novesky, Shahzia Sikander

Source: MOMA

The cover of Roots and Wings

On the occasion of Children’s Book Week, we asked the team who made the newly published Roots and Wings to share some behind-the-scenes insights into how it came about.

How did you all come to work together on this project?

Shahzia Sikander: I was invited five years ago by MoMA. I had a young child who loved to paint and I thought it would be so cool for him to read a book about his mother. I also loved the children’s books produced by MoMA on Jacob Lawrence, Sonia Delauney, and Yayoi Kusama. I met Hanna through MoMA and she did some sketches and I fell in love with the cover image capturing the spirit of the young girl painting and riding the benevolent and wise simurgh, a Persian mythical bird, the gesture symbolic of harnessing imagination and intellect. Initially I was asked to write the text for the book myself. It was a learning curve. I realized writing for young kids is best in the hands of a children’s author so when the project got picked up again with Amy I was thrilled. I loved that she had written about my favorite female artists: Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Hanna Barczyk: In 2016, I received a request to be one of the illustrators to create a few sample illustrations for a possible picture book about Shahzia Sikander. I am happy to say that I was the artist chosen to illustrate the book. That summer, I had a chance to meet with Shahzia in her Times Square studio and began the process of collecting pictures and images. Shahzia showed me a few books to look at, which included The Adventures of Hamza. She introduced me to the fables of Kalila and Demna and writer Korney Chukovsky, and shared stories of her life growing up in Pakistan. She took me through her studio and showed me animations and drawings that she was currently working on. Storyboard sketches followed with a rough idea on planning out the book. A few months later, however, the book was put on hold. In December 2019, I received the news that Roots and Wings was back on. I was thrilled to be reunited with Shahzia to continue our journey to bring the original and new sketches to life.

Amy Novesky: Abrams, who distributes MoMA’s books, recommended me to MoMA when they were looking for someone to cowrite Shahzia’s story. Abrams published two of my picture books about artists: Me, Frida (about Frida Kahlo) and Cloth Lullaby (about Louise Bourgeois). I am both a children’s book author and an editor—currently I am the children’s book editorial director for Cameron Kids, a division of Abrams. It’s a small world!

Illustration from Roots and Wings

BANI ABIDI: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared - MCA Chicago

 

Sep 4, 2021 – Jun 5, 2022 @ MCA Chicago

About

In Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi (b. 1971, lives and works in Karachi and Berlin) critiques those who hold power—and the many ways they wield it. Abidi is a master storyteller, using humor and absurdism to take on issues of militarism and nationalism as well as memory, belonging, and self-determination. Like an archaeologist of urban life, Abidi intermingles fact with fiction in stories that navigate the intersection of personal and political drama. This major survey, developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, explores more than two decades of Abidi’s practice and features video, photography, sound installations, and new work, as well as work from the MCA Collection.

The MCA presentation is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation; Natasha Ginwala, Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin; and Bana Kattan, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

Curators’ note

Pakistani artist Bani Abidi (b. 1971, lives and works in Karachi and Berlin) lampoons the languages of power and their diverse manifestations in nationalism, militarization, state surveillance, and gender norms. Featuring formative video, photography, and sound works as well as new commissions, this major survey explores the artist’s practice over two decades and includes work from the MCA Collection. Playing the role of a storyteller and urban archaeologist, Abidi delves into an emotional and psychological space of satire, absurdity, and social commentary. In this exhibition developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, the artist’s works are imbued with personal and communal narratives impacted by current geopolitical relations between India and Pakistan, the historical power struggles of South Asia, and the local impact of interventionist American operations in the wider region. From the specific social and political context of Pakistan, she wrestles with the collective amnesia of a cosmopolitan promise that has been erased by nativist populism as well as ideological and sectarian nationalism that also encroaches upon struggles for justice around the world.

The artist performs to the camera in her earliest video works made while she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. These role-plays that figure Indian and Pakistani protagonists mine the history and current political tensions between the two neighboring states through whimsical, comparative analysis of food, music, and news media. These works manifest divisions within the popular imagination, while revealing deep affinities that transgress borders. In later works, disciplined and defiant bodies confront visible and invisible spectrums of power. Everyday life must navigate immigration protocol, road closures, and taxonomies of security barricades. The dramaturgy that animates much of Abidi’s work blurs the distinction between screen time and real time, actors and non-actors, scripted and spontaneous moments.

For this exhibition, Abidi expanded the watercolor series The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared (2019–ongoing) that engages with the memory of writers, political leaders, and bloggers across Pakistan who have disappeared over the past decade. Her new work, The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), features an affective archive of gestures and dispositions associated with masculinist leadership, such as charisma, comradeship, and patriotic fervor, which have been assembled from news media. Memorial to Lost Words (2017–18) offers a historically grounded reflection on memory and lamentation, pairing old Punjabi songs with confiscated letters written by South Asian soldiers to loved ones while fighting on behalf of the colonizing British during World War I. The work asks how the testimony of a beloved, South Asian solider in the trenches during the World War I speaks today as warring times persist.

This exhibition is an ensemble that acknowledges multiple forms of living in relation, moving across geographies while holding onto aspiration and desire. With dry wit and expert storytelling, Abidi gestures to how acts of defiance remain legible and embrace irony in her milieu—carving out pockets of liberation from scenes of dominance and forced homogenization.

This exhibition follows on from the artist’s solo survey exhibition Bani Abidi: They Died Laughing at Gropius Bau, Berlin, curated by Natasha Ginwala, which was on view from June 6 to September 22, 2019, and Bani Abidi: Funland at the Sharjah Art Foundation, which was on view from October 12, 2019 to January 12, 2020, cocurated by Hoor Al Qasimi and Natasha Ginwala.

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities

 

Source: BrooklynRail

Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities

By Pepe Karmel

Shahzia Sikander, The Scroll (detail), 1989–90. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 13 1/2 x 63 7/8 inches. Collection of the Artist, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

Born in Lahore in 1969, Shahzia Sikander spent part of her teenage years in Africa. In 1989, at the age of 20, she visited London, where she discovered the mystical work of Anselm Kiefer. Returning to Pakistan, she enrolled at the National College of Arts, a bastion of creative freedom under the military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Many of the artists teaching at the NCA were unabashed modernists; others were looking for ways to combine modernism with the tradition of Mughal miniature painting. Sikander chose to study with Bashir Ahmad, who was devoted to preserving its classical language.

Arriving in the United States in 1993, Sikander studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1997, she was included in the Whitney Biennial along with other artists from outside the New York mainstream such as Gabriel Orozco, Cecilia Vicuña, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker. In 1998, Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies showed her together with Byron Kim and Yinka Shonibare. In these years, the discovery of artists from outside the United States and Europe went hand-in-hand with the discovery of artists of color from within the United States. Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, curated by Jan Howard for the RISD Museum and currently on view at the Morgan Library, takes us back to the Big Bang of global contemporary art.

The exhibition (beautifully installed at the Morgan by Isabelle Dervaux) is divided into four chapters. First, we encounter Sikander’s early work, where she used the painstaking technique of Mughal miniature painting to evoke the condition of modern Pakistani women, living cloistered existences under the Hudood Ordinances imposed in 1979. Set within modern versions of Mughal painting’s axonometric architecture, Sikander’s haunting narratives recall the work of Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo.

Shahzia Sikander, Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, 1989–97. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 8 5/8 x 5 3/4 inches. The Collection of Carol and Arthur Goldberg, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

The second chapter of the exhibition surveys Sikander’s two years at RISD (1993–95), where she experimented with radically different imagery: black, flowing ink drawings of women’s bodies, exaggerating breasts and thighs and replacing hands and feet with looping tendrils, like roots turned back upon themselves. These images of what Jan Howard calls “female interiority” were inspired by artists like Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, and Mona Hatoum; by feminist theorists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and bell hooks; and by feminist poets from Pakistan like Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Sikander also used flowing lines of white ink to surround her figures with veils and burqas, sometimes suggesting cages and sometimes protective carapaces. Sikander’s radical reinvention of her artistic identity was assisted by friendships formed at RISD with instructors like the African American painter Donnamaria Bruton and with fellow students like Kara Walker and Julie Mehretu. The artistic exchanges between Sikander, Walker, and Mehretu helped write the agenda for subsequent contemporary art, much as the interaction between Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns determined the key issues for American art of the 1960s.

After RISD, Sikander spent two years at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Stopping in a series of southern cities during her drive from Providence to Houston, Sikander came to see American slavery as a consequence of British imperialism, different from but intimately related to the colonial history of South Asia. Mehretu arrived in Houston a year later. Both of them were deeply involved with the Project Row Houses founded in 1994 by Rick Lowe and a group of local artists, who created a new kind of “social sculpture” by buying and restoring a group of small shotgun houses, some of which became housing for single mothers completing their educations, while others provided spaces for artists to make installations. The project reinforced Sikander’s bonds with other participants such as Mehretu and Fred Wilson, and she also became close to artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Mel Chin, who were in Houston at the time.

In her last months at RISD, Sikander experimented with adding fluid, formless figures to her earlier miniatures, and in Houston this process of overpainting became central to her work. In a recent interview with Rafia Zakaria, she notes that “I was violating my own work in an attempt to unlearn and learn simultaneously.” The formless figures were accompanied by new personae, some borrowed from Hindu miniatures, others from contemporary visual culture. For instance, in Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, completed in 1997, she began with a 1989 painting based on a 16th-century miniature of a man reading, and added a variety of new images: meticulously drawn portraits of Rick Lowe (full-face and in profile), heraldic blazons (one showing the Row Houses), circles containing versions of her self-rooted figure, and disembodied arms clutching knives and hatchets, evoking the Hindu goddess Durga. Around this time, she also broke out of the formal constraints of the miniature, creating mural-scale montages with her new repertory of figures painted directly on the wall or onto hanging strips of translucent paper. (A mural montage in this style forms the centerpiece of the Morgan installation.)

Shahzia Sikander, Intimacy, 2001. Dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 8 1/2 x 11 inches. Collection of Jeanne and Michael Klein; Promised gift to the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

In 1997 Sikander moved to New York. It meant separating from the supportive group of artists she had found in Houston, but she rapidly acquired a new community. In the RISD catalog, Julie Mehretu recalls Sikander’s exhibition openings as bringing together groups that were usually invisible in the art world and that rarely mixed with one another: Pakistani with Indian, East African with African American, trans with cis. Sikander’s major iconographic innovation of these years was an image of two women joined in a weightless embrace: an 11th-century Devata figure in the Hindu tradition of erotic temple sculpture, with her bent knee perched atop the shoulder of the central figure from Agnolo Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid (ca. 1545). Venus steadies Devata by grasping her extended foot and reaches upward to tug provocatively at her necklace. The pair is represented at the Morgan by a 2001 drawing, Intimacy, and a sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), more sensual than its painted prototypes.

However, the effective conclusion of the exhibition is the 2003 video SpiNN (like the television network CNN but spinning). This announces Sikander’s venture into the world of animation, a frequent element of her more recent work. The setting of the video shows the throne room of Shah Jahan, a 17th-century emperor, as depicted in a painting by the Mughal master Bichitr. But the emperor and his courtiers have vanished, and the space is invaded by a crowd of nude gopis (cowherding girls), who are then transformed into a swarm of bat-like black creatures. (These prove, on close inspection, to be remnants of their black hair, pulled up into topknots.) With Maligned Monsters and SpiNN, Sikander moves into the realm of magic realism: a visual equivalent to the fiction of Rabih Alameddine, Salman Rushdie, Qurratulain Hyder, and Gabriel GarcíaMárquez.

Sikander’s extraordinary impact on American art becomes more comprehensible if we revisit the early 1990s, just before her arrival in the United States. The 1993 Whitney Biennial thrust identity politics onto the center stage of contemporary art. At the time, it was widely denounced as excessively political; in hindsight, it seems prescient. Homi Bhabha’s catalog essay, “Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation,” provided a manifesto for diasporic consciousness. Bhabha called for a “new internationalism” emerging from “the history of postcolonial migration.” He insisted on “the need to think beyond narratives of origin.” As he saw it, the new avant-garde would focus on “‘in-between’ spaces” and the “interstices” between cultures. In the mid-1990s, Sikander, Mehretu, and Walker began to make art that did exactly that.

Even in 1993, however, Bhabha anticipated that the relationships between communities with “shared histories of deprivation and discrimination” might nonetheless be “profoundly antagonistic [and] conflictual.” There was no guarantee that the utopian community of diasporic artists in New York could provide a model for the larger world. Indeed, the decades since 1993 have demonstrated that artistic heritage can too easily be co-opted into the service of right-wing nationalism.

Sikander’s work, from 1993 onward, ferociously defies co-optation. She subverts heritage as rapidly as she invokes it. Layering images from multiple sources and in multiple visual languages, she operates in the cultural interstices described by Bhabha. It should be noted that an American audience is at risk of seeing Sikander as working primarily in the space between South Asian and Euro-American culture. Certainly, the encounter between these cultures is evoked by her repeated pairing of Devata and Venus.

Shahzia Sikander, Separate Working Things I, 1993–95. Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, gold (paint), and tea on wasli paper, 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches. Private Collection, © Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.

What is more fundamental to her work, however, are the tensions within South Asian culture. From the foundation of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century until the subcontinent’s violent partition in 1947, South Asian culture was an indissoluble mixture of Hindu and Islamic elements. Painters and writers drew freely on multiple traditions. After 1947, however, artists and writers in the new state of Pakistan came under increasing pressure to invent a purely Islamic heritage, excluding the Hindu elements of their culture. Conversely, the right-wing government of India has in recent years attempted to eliminate the Islamic elements of the country’s history and culture. Sikander’s work unwaveringly resists this pressure for cultural uniformity.

This resistance is visible in Sikander’s early painting Perilous Order, on view at the Morgan, and in an important series of sequels. Perilous Order began in 1989 as what seemed to be a study in the manner of Mughal portraiture, showing a bearded king or prince in profile, framed within an oval, with a rectangular border filled with elegant, interlacing tendrils. In a recent interview, Sikander explained that it was in fact a portrait of a gay friend, intended as a comment “on homosexuality and its precarious existence within the Punjabi culture of Lahore.” In 1994–97 she reworked the image. First, she added a larger decorative border, covered with swirling patterns. Then she inserted her self-rooted figure, its breasts surrounding the man’s face and its thighs occupying his torso. Finally, she added several nude female figures, one emerging from the inner oval of the portrait, the other three ascending and descending from its rectangular frame.

In a 2001 conversation with Vishakha Desai, Sikander explained that Bashir Ahmad, her guide to the tradition of the Mughal miniature, also introduced her to the non-Mughal traditions of South Asian art. In another discussion, with Fereshteh Daftari, Sikander noted that the female figures in Perilous Order were “plucked from a Basohli painting, an early 18th-century illustration of the Bhagavata Purana, showing maidens whose clothes Krishna has stolen.” Indeed, M.S. Randhawa’s Basohli Painting (Calcutta, 1959) reveals that the nude figures in Perilous Order are exact reproductions of four gopis in an 18th-century miniature, who have disrobed so that they can bathe in a secluded pool.

The gopis from the Basohli miniature are a recurrent presence in Sikander’s work. They appear in her 1995 painting Apparatus of Power, in the 2001 painting Gopi Crisis, and in the early stages of the 2003 animation SpiNN. The narrative of Krishna Stealing the Clothes of Cowherdesses casts some light on the recurring “gopi crisis.” According to the Bhagavata Purana, the god Krishna stole the clothes of the bathing gopis and hid in a nearby tree. After an initial moment of panic, the gopis recognized Krishna and bowed their heads in prayer. Mocking their modesty, Krishna insisted that they climb naked from the water to reclaim their clothes. As Randhawa, the editor of the Basohli album, explains, “When the soul goes forth into the darkness of the unconditioned to meet the Supreme Being to yield herself to Him, she goes in all her nakedness.”

What, then, do the gopis mean in Sikander’s work? In Perilous Order, they seem at first glance to be in orbit around the princely figure. Or are the dark “root” figure and the pale encroaching nudes meant to challenge his masculine authority? (And what does this say about the precariousness of homosexual desire within Punjabi society?) In Gopi Crisis, dark formless figures surround a milling crowd of nudes. What exactly is the crisis? Is it the terror of the gopis, discovered in their nakedness? Or is it their refusal to be intimidated? In SpiNN, the symbolism seems more straightforward: the gopis occupy the seat of power. But then they dissolve into their hairdos and fly away.

There are no simple answers in Sikander’s work. But there is an urgent invitation to walk through the looking glass into a series of different worlds, foreign yet uncannily familiar, where the partitions of other continents reveal the fault lines of our own.

Contributor

Pepe Karmel

Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. He is the author of two books, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History (2020). He has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues and for the New York Times, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has also curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).