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Known for her traditional Indian-Persian miniature paintings, a traditional style that is both highly stylized and disciplined (art 21, paragraph 1), as well as a variety of other media, artist Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. Having lived in the United States since 1993, she was educated as an undergraduate at the National College of Arts in Lahore. After, she went and studied at Rhode Island School of Design, leading her to receive her MFA in 1995. A lot of the work that she has created over the course of her career involves her examining and breaking down archetypes and stereotypes in art history, and along with this, questioning the assigned roles of women and simplistic notions of an East-West divide (Brown, Davenport, paragraph 8). Though not just a divide, but a collision of East and West as well.

However, in doing so, she herself is not portraying, or making those who see her artwork believe she is trying to say anything necessarily political. Her work is not about trying to give any sort of commentary about any type of person or society. “...She rarely allows extra-artistic concerns to undermine the aesthetic force of her work. "For me," she writes, "art is not a conduit to politics, feminism, or religion. It is a ticket to experience" (Kunitz, 47-48). She has also mentioned before in the past that because of her time spent living in America, she doesn’t want her work to be seen as any type of commentary on Palestine, or the East as a whole. Once during a talkback for an art show, “ …Sikander complained that when she visited Pakistan not long ago she was peppered with questions about her politically charged work. And although she argued that this represented only a small portion of her output, it made no difference to her interrogators” (Rodgers, 12). This issue seems to occur because of Sikander's use of drawing from her early training and use of imagery from the Palestinian, eastern world, along with drawing from symbolism from other parts of the world. These two parts of her being totally different pieces of her life story, but her being able to use her artwork in order to combine the two is a constant theme that can be seen across a lot of what she makes.

These things being brought together as one makes it very easy for the assumption to be made that the artwork she is creating is trying to tell a bigger story, even though what she may have included may only be for design, and nothing more. Though obviously, that is not always the cause when it comes to what she is creating. “Sikander seems to be saying that her work is more about growing up surrounded by a wide range of visual stimuli--from the traditional Muslim world to pop culture--than about the cultural symbolism of the imagery” (Rodgers, 12). Though, as we mentioned earlier, many people do argue against this idea of the way she thinks on her artwork, and there are those who still try to, what she would deem, overanalyze what she has created in order to unlock some secret hidden belief or idea that the artwork is trying to show through Sikander.

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The Many Faces of Islam, 1999. Gouache, watercolor, gold leaf, and graphite, on tea-stained wasli paper

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Promiscuous Intimacies, 2020, Patinated bronze, 40 x 23.5 x 19.5 in.

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A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, 2001, Acrylic on board, 26 9/16 x 14 9/16 inches

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Witness, 2023, Painted milled high-density foam, steel, fiberglass, glass tile; 18 x 13 x 13 ft.

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Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off, 1998. Collage with vegetable colour, dry pigment, watercolour, graphite, and tea on wasli paper, 24.3 x 50 cm (9 9/16 x 19 11/16 in).

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Infinite Woman, 2021, Watercolor, ink, gouache and gold leaf on paper, 167.6 x 152.4 cm66 x 60 in

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The Uprooted Order, Series 3, No. 1, 1997, watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper

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Who’s Veiled Anyway? by Shahzia Sikander, 1997, Transparent and opaque watercolor, tea, graphite pencil, and charcoal on board, Sheet: 11 5/16 × 8 1/8in. (28.7 × 20.6 cm), via The Morgan Library and Museum, New York

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The reason behind why I chose the pieces of artwork that I did for this exhibit is because they are all pieces do in fact seem to have some sort of almost feminist agenda to them, even if it's not entirely what the piece may be trying to say. If the artwork isn't having to do with feminism, then it is sharing about Sikander's life journey and what she has gone through and experienced in her life between Pakistan and the United States. If these topics aren't what Shahzia meant to share through her work, it's still interesting to try and get your own opinion from what you are seeing yourself, especially if the idea is related to the two subjects that I discussed. Maybe it being an almost subconscious choice on Sikander's behalf.

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A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation is an unfinished panel. It was originally designed to be a part of a 50-foot-tall mural that had been commissioned. For Sikander, this piece, despite not being used with what it was originally created for, it still has a very deep meaning behind it. To Sikander, “the referents are manifold: the Jewish Shekhina, or Saqueena in Quranic parlance—the feminine complement to the masculine divine—and the chthonic mother goddesses of the Indus Valley"(The Morgan Library & Museum). The female figure can be seen hovering, holding onto weapons such as swords and an axe, meaning to represent defense, while in one hand she holds a scale, this being shown to represent justice. It gives a sense of female power and resilience for what it is they have to stand up and fight for themselves in a place that is their own home and should feel equal and at peace in.

After 9/11 occurred, those that had this piece commissioned had misunderstood the Sikander's meaning behind what she was having this womanly figure hold, it being a show more of violence than strength. She was asked to change it but decided to instead to pull away entirely from the commission.

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Promiscuous Intimacies, was decided to be made from varied patinated bronze. "The various patinas highlight the fact that classical painted statuary was polychromatic and not necessarily "lily white" as constructed over time in the popular imagination"(Sikander, 96). The sculpture shows two women in a very intimate pose with one another. Sikander decided to work with two female models will figuring out the position of the two in her piece, it being very informative to her when it came down to specific details of the womanly form. " It allowed me to work out the essential details of form, the movement in space, the gestures, the nuances in the tilt of their heads, the gaze, the cupping of the hand, the tug at the necklace, the several opposing forms and their legibility"(Sikander, 96).The two figures that can be seen used in paintings of Sikander's before and were originally only a mere sketch for a different project entirely before she decided to give them the honor of become a sculpture.

She drew upon these two figures showing the symbolic weight of communal identity from across different areas of her world, this being from where she originates from, Pakistan, and her now home of the United States. With this comes those who assume that one woman symbolizes the Goddess Venus and the Indian Devata. With this in mind, the two together in the positions they reside in can bring upon the desires of non-heteronormalities, which by most are pushed to the side and ignored, those types of feelings being seen as foreign and even inauthentic. For both the East and West, feelings and emotions cause by nonheteronormative thoughts or ideas are definitely seen in such a way. Sikander wanted to viewer, from this sculpture, to be able to envision a different view of the past, present, and future with these god-like women. One where these emotions, thoughts, and feelings aren't seen as something to be taken in a negative light. For they are something as beautiful as any other.

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Witness is a sculpture piece that was made in order to dive into cultural interconnectedness and female representation. Here we see an 18-foot-tall golden woman, her arms and legs resembling roots growing in and around one another. The woman herself is not touching the ground, and According to Sikander, "... the form is self-rooted and “can carry its roots wherever it goes...” (Public Art University of Houston Systems). This having it to where her roots are able to be across all types of places, connect to any type of culture. She is also able to represent the questioning of identity one may have when they are not grounded in somewhere, always on the move and going from place to place.

The sculpture features braids in the shape of ram horns, these representing unity of different pieces of culture, race, womanhood and more of Sikander's own life. Her skirt also includes Arabic writing that says "havah", which is from the Urdu word meaning "air" and "atmosphere" and the Arabic and Hebrew word for "Eve". The rings spiraling around represent the lines of longitude and latitude on a map, another callback to her being a sort of representation of the world.

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The Faces of Islam was made through materials such as gouache, watercolor, gold leaf, and graphite. These being used on tea-stained wasli paper. The reason for its creation was for the New York Times Magazine feature “Old Eyes and the New: Scenes from the Millennium, Reimagined by Living Artists” back in September 1999. The two figures splitting the center of the painting hold between them a piece of American currency, and on it there is the quote from the Quran: “Which, then, of your Lord’s blessing do you both deny?”

Those surrounding the center figures are men and woman who have had positions of power or worked hard to create and make the East a better place to live. Specifically, many having to do from where she had once come from, Pakistan. Along with this, them being in the piece helps speak on the alliances between these leaders and the power of America. According to Sikander, “The 1990s was about war, coalitions, alternating friends and foes, imposed sanctions, debts forgiven, and human rights brushed under the carpet as America flexed its military muscle around the world. This work took this history into account, and I proposed that American policy in Islamic countries would become a defining issue in the new millennium" (The Morgan Library & Museum). The painting overall sharing and giving those who see it a look at these individuals who have tried to make their part of their world better, and to show the greater parts of it. That not just men, but women too, have done much work to try and show and fix the place they call home. In doing so, those who live there, and those from all the way in the West, understand how the world they live in isn't just what the media tries to portray it as, especially when it comes to their religious work and practices, and how that shapes their lives much differently than of those in the States. "The work was always resisting that type of fetishization, especially about the Muslim woman as needing to be saved, especially in how it gets played up in Hollywood, in media, in TV, in this"(Davenport, 20), and "... it has a deeper history of the representation of the veil in European colonial imperial history. And it counters it with other types of narratives, where the joyousness of the feminine, the inherent female agency, autonomy, ability to be creative, where its inner beauty, its inner strength is very present"(Davenport, 21). These being regularly occurring themes and ideas throughout countless other pieces she has created.

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The portraits are, clockwise from upper left: Anwar Sadat; Menachem Begin; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional music; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan; Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, president of Pakistan; Benazir Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan; Malcolm X; Salman Rushdie; Nawal el Saadawi, feminist writer and physician, spokeswoman for the status of women in the Arab world; King Hussein; King Faisal; Asma Jahangir, Pakistani human rights lawyer and social activist; Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian nation; Ayatollah Khomeini; Saddam Hussein (The Morgan Library & Museum).

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Who’s Veiled Anyway?, was a piece made to challenge tradition, as many of Sikander's pieces are known for doing. This one in particular goes into both gender and religion within her own life and past. She's wanting you to take a step back from what the piece is showing and think harder on what exactly it is making you feel when really trying to understand what Sikander is trying to share to those seeing the image.

What she has done here is trying to make you look differently at the idea of the veiled, Muslim woman. What we see in the painting someone who looks to be a Muslim female, veiled. But, when taking a closer inspection, you are able to distinguish that it is actually a male figure. Through the use of the veil, these long, flowing white lines, she was able to disguise and hide away what the viewers would usually assume as a woman, putting on a more androgynous tone to the form. She uses the white as a tool for editing in her work here, one way being a way of redacting, a way of question who gets to define these sorts of things, and why they get the power to do so. Why must women be looked at and questioned, especially in the West, about the clothing they may decide to choose to wear, or must wear due to the religion that they follow?

Shahzia speaks more specifically on the matter of her piece. “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"(The Morgan Library & Museum).

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In Infinite Woman shows the love and radiance that Sikander has over the female body and form. In the piece we are able to witness what is a "...multi-colored, identically shaped female forms (and their shadows) become the radial axes that both emanate from and dissolve into the edges of an intricately painted sphere, encrusted in small patches of ochre, blue, green and black..."(Pilar Corrias). Some assume it could the reference to something like the scorching sun. That woman are such strong, powerful beings that they rival even our own sun. When looking upon the piece, the heavy repetition of the female forms surrounding this sphere almost even give the look sun beams, shining out onto anything that's nearby. Shahzia puts woman as the center of many of her pieces, whether that be literally or metaphorically, but here it seems she has truly gone and done it in the literal sense.

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In Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off, we are put witness to a female figure with multiple arms holding onto, or trying to keep hold of, what we can assume are items that seem to have a very large significance to her. She looks disheveled, her clothes looking tattered and ripped to shreds, just barely hanging onto her form. The items she is reaching out for are a chalawa (a symbol of impermanence), a turtle (a symbol of endurance), a child, a portrait of a woman, and a self-portrait of Sikander herself. She's looks to be trying to keep these different parts of her life and self together, not wanting to let any of them go over the others. The faces of all the people within the painting are unable to be seen fully, a way for Sikander to keep the racial and cultural identities unknown. She wants her viewers to question and propose their own thoughts and ideas on different types of identities in the West, and what parts of themselves make them be seen as a real citizen.

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The Uprooted Order, Series 3 is one of three miniature paintings. It had been rendered with vegetable dyes, tea stains, and watercolors made from pigments that have been dried. These pigments then being placed onto handmade paper known as wasli.

Shahzia has spoken about how this painting references the two Hindu deities Ratna and Krishna; however, she has removed all presence of the Krishna, the male deity. This being done so she can focus specifically on the feminine, and how empowering it can be. We can see the female form balancing on one foot underneath a tree with blooming flowers, holding onto a branch. She is also pining down a white, shadowy form with looping feet and wings. We see other types of these creatures as if they are looking on from a distance. Shahzia is wanting to give the feeling of both rootedness and being afloat from these individuals.

“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” (The Morgan Library & Museum).