http://www.asiasociety.org/arts/conversations.html
Conversations with Traditions: Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander
November 17, 2001 - March 3, 2002
An excerpt from the exhibition catalogue, available at AsiaStore.
Conversations with Traditions is a series of exhibitions that will explore the dialogue between contemporary issues and indigenous artistic languages expressed in the work of Asian and Asian American artists. The series will focus on artists who are developing new expressions out of traditional visual idioms or who create new ways to connect with or challenge centuries-old cultural norms.
Nilima Sheikh
Ritualised Mourning-Marshia (from the series When Champa Grew Up), 1984
Tempera on paper
12 x 16 in.
New walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester City Museums Service Shahzia Sikander and Nilima Sheikh are both of South Asian origin, but of different generations - Shahzia Sikander, in her 30s and Nilima Sheikh in her 50s. Sikander was born in Pakistan, which was carved out of India at the time India achieved its independence from Great Britain in 1947. Sheikh was born in an undivided, pre-independent India. Both claim pre-modern Rajput and Mughal court (miniature) painting as their artistic lineage. At first glance, some of their works share this starting point in terms of scale, composition, and even the use of color. However, the two artists articulate differing relationships with both the pre-modern court painting traditions and contemporary art practices.
Sikander’s training was traditional-she graduated from the National College of Art in Lahore, where students study in an Islamic context and court painting is taught as a formal course. However, much of her recent career has been spent in the United States. She is thus acutely aware of the reception of her work in the context of “mainstream” contemporary Western art and is concerned to deny simplistic readings of her work as “exotic.” Sheikh, on the other hand, claims a lineage born of pre-independence Indian nationalism fostered in the climate of progressive internationalism of the 1940s and 1950s. Trained initially in Western-style oil painting (she has spent all of her student and professional life in Baroda in India), Sheikh turned her attention to miniature painting mid-career. Her relationship to pre-modern painting has been thus more geared toward its visual forms than its technical aspects. Yet both artists talk passionately about the materiality of their work and the meditative quality of working slowly and patiently in the intimate format of small-scale painting.
Shahzia Sikander
Venus’s Wonderland, 1995-97
Vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, tea water, and collage on hand-prepared wasli paper
12" x 10 3/4"
Collection of Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Shahzia Sikander
Monsters Within, 2000
Watercolor, dry pigment, vegetable color, and tea wash on wasli hand-prepared paper
15" x 11 1/2"
Courtesy of the artist The exhibition presents approximately 30 individual works by each artist, including work from their early encounters with miniature painting as well as recent work that suggests the changing nature of such relationships. Additionally, the artists have created a specially commissioned collaborative work to be installed on the wall behind the main staircase of the Asia Society’s renovated headquarters in New York.
Support for this project was provided by The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Booth Ferris Foundation. Support for the Asia Society’s Cultural Programs is also provided by the Friends of Asian Arts, Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds, The Starr Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Hazen Polsky Foundation, The Armand G. Erpf Fund, the Arthur Ross Foundation, and the Ruth and Harold Newman, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Read an in-depth essay on the art of twentieth-century India and Pakistan
Interview
The following excerpt is from an interview with Sheikh and Sikander conducted by Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Vice President and Director of the Museum and Cultural Programs, Asia Society, and curator of the exhibition:
Introduction
Vishakha N. Desai (VND): I would like to organize our discussion around four general areas: your training and technique; your relationship-conceptual and otherwise-to traditional miniature painting; your connection to one another and the politics of art and culture in South Asia; and your sense of the art “worlds” that you are part of.
Genesis
VND: What did miniature painting represent for you when you began studying art?
Shahzia Sikander (SS): In Lahore, it wasn’t seen as a very active way of developing self-expression, so you naturally weren’t inclined to go in that direction.
Nilima Sheikh (NS): In Baroda, too, modernism definitely pushed these older traditions out of the way.
VND: You’ve both mentioned the painter and teacher K.G. Subramanyan and his work Moving Focus. How did it influence you?
SS: Reading it, I felt as if it transcended time! It didn’t matter that it was written by an Indian, it really spoke to me. It was his description of the art-making process, rooted in a very non-Western practice and in his own philosophy.
VND: Nilima, Subramanyan was your teacher, right?
NS: Yes, my “guru” really–he had a fundamental influence on my art-making process. And he was the main source of my discovery of Indian traditions. But his ideas and his approaches cross all boundaries. And the way that he relates craft traditions to modern techniques allows for a different way of developing art-making practices. His ideas made it possible for me to think in terms of non-Western traditions, to think about painting in South Asia beyond oil painting on an easel.
Politics of “Tradition”
VND: In Pakistan, from a political point of view, it must have been hard to acknowledge the pre-independence Indian sources of 20th-century tradition.
SS: I think people in the arts are the only group in Pakistan that is trying to create some understanding of what is going on in India. It is the artists who go out of their way to build connections. Pakistan is living out a national dilemma. How do you acknowledge your past or your traditions when they are really Indian?
Connecting with Tradition
VND: Nilima, when you began to paint, was the whole question of nationalism and indigenous style still an active discussion?
NS: Yes, early on I was a “Progressive” painter in a modernist tradition. So I felt that I could define my differences from that style as I began to engage with miniature painting as a medium. I came to miniature painting as a move away from the “modern,” my “parent” style.
SS: In Pakistan, artists had a different relationship to the miniature, perhaps more conceptual; nonetheless, we also viewed it from a technical perspective.
Interconnections: India and Pakistan-the Culture of Politics
VND: Nilima, in India, I imagine people didn’t even care to know about art in Pakistan until recently.
NS: Actually, in the art world, we were beginning to feel anxious about not knowing anything about Pakistan. But somehow it didn’t seem possible to have such a connection.
VND: Shahzia, do you feel that in Pakistan, as in India, the issue of a religious divide has hardened in the last decade or so?
SS: Yes, it seems that in my generation the question of nationalism and national politics is always centered on religion. There is an uneasy relationship between being a Pakistani and being a Muslim.
Perception of Tradition-Interrogating Modernism
NS: For me, the problem was to find a voice in the miniature painting that spoke to me. The only way you could create your space was to rebel against the modernism that was prevalent. One artist friend said about me, “Her paintings are very feminine and domestic.” Not a complement. So I said to myself, “Why should I not paint domestic scenes. I spend my whole day with my children. Why should I not make my painting relevant for me?”
SS: I also thought it was more about subverting modernism. Also, the Pakistani art world is small and exists within a nationalistic institutional structure, so it has developed a very interesting relationship with the government. For example, during all the military regimes, many artists, including women artists, emerged with independent voices. In fact, in the art world in Pakistan women have become the equal of men.
Personal Connections to Painting Processes
VND: How do you relate to the idea of intimacy in your work?
NS: Very strongly. When I started working in this style, I had already become a mother and I found it conceptually liberating and emotionally rewarding to paint my immediate surroundings on a small scale. Then I got involved in it formally and conceptually, and I found in it the way to express my voice and vision. But I felt so alone when I started on this path. So, Shahzia, when I first heard about your work I was so happy to know that somebody else was working in a style that was important to me.
SS: That’s an amazing compliment, because your work was part of my learning experience. I took it for granted. I was exposed to it in school and I was keen to meet you and learn more about your work and share ideas with you. But because of the visa difficulties at the time, I couldn’t. It was at that time I decided to break all ties and take off for America.
I also came to understand that if I wanted to pursue a career in miniature painting, I had to subject myself to intense training, and no matter how much you resisted copying, that was part of the training. In the West, it has been read as nostalgia, which reduces understanding of the work to its most simplistic level. Often the work is discussed only as an ethnic issue.
VND: I think that it’s very interesting that both of you find the process of creating a copy liberating.
SS: On one level, copying can mean understanding. You have to look at someone else’s work very carefully and then relate to it in a personal way.
NS: People tend to confuse copying with nostalgia. But, I try to explain that I am interested in relating history to myself and that by copying earlier images with my hands and interpreting them through my mind I can make history my own.
Processes, Sources
SS: With miniature painting, you’re sitting there drawing on a small piece of paper, you spend months just doing one or two little things. You need to learn control and patience, and to respect tradition. But patience was the key. I was stubborn, stubborn and competitive and I wanted to succeed at my own game, at my pace. Technique was not going to be a reason for people to point fingers at me.
NS: I never had any real training in miniature painting technique. I feel I use aspects of miniature painting technology rather than technique, because I use materials and methods and pigments that are part of the modern vocabulary. I’m not like Shahzia. Even today I would not be able to paint correct miniature technique, but it seemed logical that if I liked looking at these paintings so much, then I should try to paint something like them. Perhaps for Shahzia, there was some level of frustration because she had to follow the regiment of technique. For me, it was very liberating, because it suddenly freed me of all the conceptual baggage that goes with the easel. I had begun to feel that there was something pompous about wall painting.
VSN: Who are some Western artists that influenced you?
SS: The Impressionists and post-Impressionists. I was particularly interested
in Bonnard, who looked at earlier works and developed a highly expressive style of his own, and Gauguin, because of his looking at ornamental design and his sense of color and his spatial sense.
NS: Matisse had a wonderful sense of color, and what juxtaposition of forms!
SS: David Hockney was a big influence.
Beyond Small Scale
VND: Both of you have also gone back and experimented and done larger format work. What was it like going back and forth?
SS: After initially going small, I began experiencing the frustration of that format. I was spending so much time working on my painting and then people would read it as small and quickly move away. They’d spend ten seconds on it, and I’d have spent ten months! Their perception was, “Okay, feminine,” or “small,” or “hey, it’s just a work on paper.” I was struggling with this perceived dichotomy of drawing and painting. I also wanted to make my work more confrontational. So I took an image out of my small works and blew it up from eight inches to ten feet, 12 feet, 15 feet, and then waited to see how people would react, and how I would react to the process. And it took only four days. It took me six weeks to do the eight-inch work!
NS: It was for a completely practical reason. Because I suddenly had a bigger studio space. I remember the pleasure of working on a large scale and the saturation of color, the kind of work where you use your body. There is an emotional relationship to the body that is quite satisfying. I really enjoy scale.
VND: Do you think you both rework a picture or a series because of the pleasure you get from the process of art-making itself?
SS: I always think of the work as a work in progress, literally as small things which will be part of a bigger thought. It’s not that I’m consciously trying to develop a connected series.
Future Directions: Self and Society
VND: I wonder if both of you would talk about where you go from here and what you see as the trajectory of the art world or worlds.
SS: Initially I would think about home as being back in Pakistan, but I never really lived and worked as an artist there. All of that has happened here, so returning now to that “home” seems awkward. But by moving to New York after being in Houston I was able to connect to a larger community and to tap into a younger artistic voice of South Asia. And then this connection starts affecting my work.
VND: Nilima, your sense of community is quite different.
NS: Completely, I’ve lived in India all my life. I divide myself now between Baroda and Delhi. Most of my working time is in Baroda, so I’m really grounded in one place. I’m never displaced, although I do enjoy travel. I enjoy collaboration, also, and I like to work with theater. I also have a strange problem in that I think painting is a kind of selfish act.
SS: But that’s always been the dilemma of painting–the notion of the artist as this lone genius in the studio versus being part of a community.
NS: I think one of the things that we have to do is to self-consciously use the miniature or other Asian traditions to break open the question of painting.
SS: For me, art-making is so much about creating your own world, about creating your own language, it’s not about reinventing tradition. If tradition is a point of departure to create something new, then it still has a very personal connection for me, and will sustain me.
VND: I hope that this conversation and the exhibition will illuminate the very personal responses both of you have had to the problems and opportunities in engaging the “tradition.” Thank you.