Joining Hindu and Muslim Icons in Art
By SOMINI SENGUPTA The New York Times
Today, Shahzia Sikander’s paintings are displayed alongside those of her onetime would-be mentor, Nilima Sheikh, in an exhibition inside the newly renovated Asia Society.
When Shahzia Sikander finished art school in Lahore, Pakistan, her hometown, she set her sights on going to India and studying with artists across the border, including an acclaimed painter named Nilima Sheikh.
Those plans were dashed when Ms. Sikander was denied a three-month visa. Switching gears, she came to the United States instead, enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1993.
Since then, the work of Ms. Sikander, 32, has attracted critical acclaim in New York City. And today, her paintings are displayed alongside those of her onetime would-be mentor, Ms. Sheikh, in an exhibition inside the newly renovated Asia Society.
Entitled “Conversations With Traditions: Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander,” the exhibition, which continues through Feb. 17, is a testament to the bonds and fractures of the life and art of India and Pakistan.
Ms. Sheikh who has lived in India her whole life, delves more explicitly into its politics. The 1947 partition, which broke the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, forced her parents, who were Hindus, to leave Lahore for India. But Ms. Sikander, born in Pakistan a generation after partition, gobbles up the stories and symbols of every trend and tradition she has encountered on her own globe-trotting path, from Lahore to New England to Houston to Brooklyn, where she now lives.
Ms. Sikander’s medium is the miniature: the laborious, seemingly archaic (or in her words, anachronistic) art form that emerged 500 years ago on the subcontinent to depict the lives of kings, gods and courtesans-in-waiting. Her subjects, though, are anything but archaic. They are women without feet or turned upside down or big-hipped and multiarmed women resembling the goddesses of the Hindu pantheon but covered in iconic Muslim veils. Her pictures, in the vivid colors of the South Asian palette and full of whimsy and pluck, are as likely to include New York City “No Parking” signs or a daisy wheel of cowboy boots as the flying Garuda figures ubiquitous in Hindu mythology.
In “Gopi Crisis” a gaggle of top- knotted figures reminiscent of the milk maidens of Hindu iconography can appear against a delicate, traditional Persian landscape. Or as in a painting called “Uprooted,” a female figure wearing a single angel’s wing can be suspended on a lotus.
This is perhaps what is most striking about Ms. Sikander’s work: while the political divisions on the subcontinent are as deep as ever, her work is a deliberate and playful mix of Hindu and Muslim iconography, a mix of pop and revered symbols.
"For Shahzia to use Rajput Hindu subjects is to say, `I belong to the South Asian cultural tradition: this is mine,’ " Vishakha N. Desai, a senior vice president at the Asia Society and the curator of the exhibition, said of the Hindu court. “That flies in the face of where we are now.”
In some ways, migration to the West has made this possible; representations of Hindu mythology, Ms. Sikander said, were not popular in her native Pakistan. But in some ways, the eclecticism of her compositions also signals a return to miniature painting’s radical past. In many of the Mogul courts in India in the 16th and 17th centuries the heyday of the miniature Hindu and Muslim artists flourished and borrowed imagery and stories from each other.
In an interview in her sunny first- floor loft in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, she offered an explanation of her own iconoclastic approach. “There’s so much mixing and borrowing between the two cultures that goes beyond the 50 years,” she said. “I’m attracted to that sort of hybrid. It’s closer to my own experience. You get to be several people.”
Besides, she added, “not to be boxed in, to be able to transcend boundaries: for an artist, it’s essential.”
The term miniature comes from the Urdu word minatura, meaning refinement. In Pakistan today, the miniature, whose sizes usually hover around 11 to 15 inches, is regarded as a form of high Islamic art.
Ms. Sikander grew up with miniatures everywhere. They were kitschy and omnipresent in the tourist bazaars. When she decided to study miniatures, her peers were shocked. Why, they asked, would she be interested in something so old-fashioned and uncreative? To study miniatures, it was thought, was to learn to imitate the old masters.
Ms. Sikander said her attraction to miniature painting surprised her as well. “I was really excited by the discovery,” she said. “There was so much potential for subversion. I could learn the language and talk back in it. I knew I had to master the craft in order to be creative.”
Ms. Sikander is a small woman with a small voice, and she chooses her words carefully, tending to speak in the difficult, high-brow language of the academy. For clarity about her work, she recommended reading an interview with the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha, legendary for the opacity of his writing.
Miniature painting is an arduous and labor-intensive tradition, one that demands nothing short of what she calls submission to the form.
Take, for instance, the smooth, translucent wasli paper customary to the miniature that she makes in big batches in her home. Three thin layers of acid-free cotton paper are pasted together with a homemade pot of wheat paste. Once dry, the paper is flattened and rubbed smooth with a shell. A pot of tea is cooked up to wash the paper and to give it its signature translucent, radiant surface. The paint itself is a combination of pigment and vegetable dye. The finest sable hair brushes are used for pinpointing detail.
“I was interested in an art form whose present was of the past” is among her favorite ways to describe the work.
“In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual,” she said.
Ms. Sikander has not returned to Lahore, where her family lives, since she came to the United States. The first few years, she said, she was too busy with work. Then her immigration application got swallowed up in the bureaucracy. Then just as she and her fiancé, Salman Kokkar, a Pakistan-born, Florida-raised business consultant, planned to go to Lahore to marry in November, the war in bordering Afghanistan had already begun. The wedding has been postponed for the moment.
Returning to Pakistan is not much on her mind. Unlike artists who regard themselves as exiles, Ms. Sikander says she is perfectly happy making pictures here. Indeed, as she is the first to say, here is where her work has won wide display, including at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the Deitch Projects in SoHo, the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
“I can do what I’m doing anywhere,” she said.
“I can only call my experience here a pleasing dislocation,” she said. That’s what she called one of her earliest solo exhibitions.
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