For the multimedia exhibition Havah… to breathe, air, life, artist Shahzia Sikander has created major new work on the theme of justice. The work in its entirety is composed of four distinct elements, two of which will be on display at the University of Houston Spring 2024. Havah… is a culmination of Sikander’s exploration of female representation in public monuments and marks her first major, site-specific outdoor exhibition in sculptural form. Disrupting more classic forms of public sculpture, the artist proclaims, “I have always had an affinity for the anti-monument within my practice.” It is the history of monumental public works, from which women and people of color have largely been absent, that provide a starting point for Sikander to reinsert the female figure into our field of visual culture. The title for the work, Havah, is taken from the word meaning “air” or “atmosphere” in Urdu and “Eve” in Arabic and Hebrew. It is precisely these ephemeral qualities that the artist brings to this work that mark it as distinct from more traditional public monuments we are accustomed to viewing. These temporary artworks are just that—works that are never meant to be fixed and unchanging, but are fluid in their space and their meaning.
Join Sikander as she discusses her artistic practice as well as recent and ongoing projects, including NOW, an eight-foot bronze female sculpture installed on the roof of the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse; Reckoning, an animation that unfolded across the screens of Times Square every midnight in September 2023; and a survey exhibition of her work organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, opening at the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in Venice in April 2024.
This lecture is made possible by the Fran and Warren Rupp Contemporary Artist Fund.
Pakistani-American multi-media visual artist Shahzia Sikander collaborates with the Movement Lab, Theatre Department, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and South Asia Institute on this process-focused Media Movement Salon (MeMoSa) Series. With a different focus each day, Shahzia will present her work in conjunction with student artists from Monday April 10th through Thursday April 13th. Shahzia then has invited fellow New York based South Asian artists to co-present their works in process on Friday and Saturday April 14th-15th. Contributing artists include Vijay Iyer, Aruna D’Souza, Chitra Ganesh, Priyanka Dasgupta, Anurima Banerji and Sa’dia Rehman.
MeMoSa Series will run from 4:00-6:00pm Monday (4/10), Tuesday (4/11), Thursday (4/13) and Friday (4/14), from 10:00am-12:00pm Wednesday (4/12), and from 3:00-5:00pm Saturday (4/15). Drop-ins are welcome!
This culminating event will look to the future of diasporic art as it contextualizes a shared narrative- a colonized past and an imperial present. Fariha Khan, Asian American Studies Co-Director, will be in conversation with Shahzia Sikander, a visual artist who has redefined contemporary understandings of diaspora and difference and Arooj Aftab, whose work as a musician has transcended genres and histories. This talk will showcase the global interconnectedness of each artist’s work as they redefine the unfurling of South Asian American Diasporic Arts. This event is open to the University and the Philadelphia community and will include a Q&A.
Join us March 7 for this exciting dialogue, presented by NYU Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective with 19 Washington Square North and co-sponsored by the Grey Art Gallery.
Alongside the opening of the exhibition of the work of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander at 19WSN, we invite you to a dialogue between Sikander and Gayatri Gopinath (Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU). Sikander’s photographs, initially taken in 2012, depict the ruin and desolation of a South Asian movie theater and its sole caretaker in Khorfakkan, Sharjah, and speak poignantly to the questions of home, displacement, belonging, and unbelonging that touch the lives of many South Asian migrants in the UAE.
Alex Katz’s work is distinguished by generative engagements with the worlds of dance, theater, literature, and fashion. Friends and collaborators from across these fields form the rich creative community that has surrounded the artist since the mid-century, and is pictured throughout the retrospective Alex Katz: Gathering. This half-day program explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. Taking as its frame of reference Katz’s boundary-crossing partnerships over the last seven decades with poets, dancers, directors, and designers, the event will consist of panel discussions featuring Sarah Crowner, Kevin Lotery, and Shantell Martin on Katz's dance and theater work; Andrew Durbin, Shahzia Sikander, and Ivy Wilson on the exchange between visual art and poetry; and poetry readings by John Godfrey, Vincent Katz, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman.
Host Lois Harada 10 PR sits down with internally-acclaimed artists Shahzia Sikander MFA 95 PT/PR and Huma Bhabha 85 PR, for a conversation about their recent participation in the RISD Limited Editions initiative, memories from their time at RISD and what they are working on now!
Artist Shahzia Sikander and human rights attorney Becca Heller will join in a public conversation on Monday, February 6 at 6 PM at Sony Square (25 Madison Avenue at 25th Street). Justice Judith Gische, who served as a judge for thirty-two years and is a member of the Board of Directors of the New York City Chapter of the New York State Women’s Bar Association, will moderate.
Long viewed as an engine of social mobility, the university is in crisis. Our day-long
convening inaugurates ongoing reflection on themes including: the history of the
disciplines, global histories of dissent, the university as infrastructure and ideological
apparatus, mass intellectuality, and democratic education.
A symposium exploring the artistic practice of Shahzia Sikander – whose work is currently on display in the West Court Gallery
Can decolonisation entail forms of intimacy? In the search for an answer to this question, an exhibition focusing on the earlier and more recent works of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) has been on display in the West Court Gallery at Jesus College.
Conversation: An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander
Thursday, July 22, 6 p.m.
Presented virtually on Zoom
Join exhibiting artists An-My Lê and Shahzia Sikander for a conversation about their artistic practices and Much Unseen is Also Here.
If you require special accommodations for this event, please contact mocp@colum.edu.
Register in advance and pay what you wish to join us on Zoom. Your contribution supports our dynamic public programs and events. Contribute here: giving.colum.edu/mocp
Shahzia Sikander and will be in conversation with Glenn Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of her exhibition Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities. The exhibition will be on view at The Morgan Library from June 18 through September 26, 2021. They will discuss Sikander's pioneering role in deconstructing Central and South Asian manuscript painting as a contemporary idiom.
ArtTable's Artist Talks Series is made possible by the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Originally formatted as in-person Artists Breakfasts, ArtTable has moved all programming into the virtual realm during the pandemic. Please join us for a virtual Artist Talk with Shahzia Sikander.
Shahzia will talk about individual works she created in 1988 to 2003, elaborating on the evolution of her unique visual lexicon as she negotiated a language between the pictoral traditions of Central and South Asia and contemporary practices, through the lens of her experience from Pakistan to the US as an immigrant pre and post 9/11 and how that period's shifting socio-political culture shaped her broader practice.
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Join artist Shahzia Sikander for a virtual presentation and reading of her new children’s book, Roots and Wings: How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist, co-authored with Amy Novesky and illustrated by Hanna Barczyk (available April 2021). Learn about Sikander’s inspirations and influences, and explore how her drawings, paintings, prints, mosaics, and animated films bring traditional artforms into dialogue with contemporary visual practices. Ask questions during a Q&A session.
Join the Department of Performance Studies in conversation about Sadia Abbas's novel, The Empty Room. Abbas will be joined by poet, fiction writer, critic, and translator John Keene and artist Shahzia Sikander.
This conversation will be moderated by Professor Fred Moten.
Examining through the lens of different disciplines, Twelve Gates Arts convenes three diasporic South Asian arts practitioners originally from Pakistan to ask the question: Who gets to tell the story of us?
Shahzia Sikander changed the game of the art world with her breakthrough at the Whitney Biennial in 1997. This year, Salman Toor, debuted his first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney, How Will I Know. In June, Sikander will open a career retrospective, Extraordinary Realities, at the Morgan Library & Museum co-organised with the RISD Museum. Centered on issues of gender, identity, global affiliations, appropriation, and narrative, this conversation engages the relationship between two artists on how they have navigated the shifting worlds of New York and Pakistan. In dialogue, we will pause and reflect over how we got here and anticipate where we are going.
Join the first Urgency of The Arts Assembly: I Need To Talk To You Urgently with guest speakers Abbas Zahedi, Legacy Russell, Shahzia Sikander & Tamu Nkiwane.
Each speaker, nominated by a current student from the School of Arts & Humanities at the RCA, will present an issue that is most important and most pressing to them right now.
Presentations will be followed by Q&A.
Presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, this new series,Radical Thinkers, places radical academics directly in conversation with trailblazing writers, poets, and artists, creating and nurturing two-way dialogues that will interrogate some of the most pressing issues facing Asian and Asian diasporic communities today. Featuring an interdisciplinary lineup of scholars and creatives, these unexpected pairings will center revolutionary discourse and scholarship in an effort to demystify intellectual debates, collapse the divide between the ‘ivory tower’ and the public sphere, and ultimately envision a radical new future.
The first installment of this series presents historian, professor, and AAWW Board Member Manan Ahmed in conversation with acclaimed visual artist Shahzia Sikander.
Virtual Gallery Tour and Artist Conversation with Dr. Ainsley M. Cameron and Jason Rosenfeld. In the first session of this program, Shahzia Sikander will lead a virtual tour of the exhibit and will be joined by Jason Rosenfeld for a conversation about the works in the show. Dr. Ainsley M. Cameron will lead a discussion with Shahzia in the second session where they will discuss themes of feminism in Sikander’s work.
Shahzia Sikander will be in conversation with the inimitable composer Du Yun, awarded the Pulitzer in Music in 2017, who wrote the musical score for all three films. Du Yun and Sikander’s decade-long collaborations span Shanghai, New York, Sharjah, Istanbul, Hong Kong, and Pakistan and speak to their ‘creative intimacy,’ female agency and shared passion for finding common ground through multiple languages.
Please join Shahzia Sikander and Sean Kelly in conversation as they discuss Sikander’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery, the artist's career, working in a new medium and her forthcoming monograph and exhibitions at The Morgan Library, New York in June 2021 followed by the RISD Museum, Rhode Island in November 2021, and MFA Houston, Texas, Spring 2022.
In 1994 Asia Society launched its contemporary art program with “Asia/America: Identities in Asian American Art,” a landmark exhibition that considered bicultural identity in the work of diasporic and Asian American artists living and working in the United States. A quarter-century later, this panel will reflect on the current playing field of artistic representation for Asian American and Asian diasporic artists in the United States and how these artists position themselves within a globalized art world. This conversation features artists Jordan Nassar and Shahzia Sikander and is moderated by Michelle Yun, senior curator, Asian contemporary art and associate director, Asia Society Triennial.
We are pleased to invite you the next artist talk of On Making, 2020 – a series that delves into the age-old query of “how do we make?” Tracing the different arcs of art and exhibition-making and how these might respond to the changing contours of tomorrow, we have with us this week a leading pioneer of neo-miniature herself – Shahzia Sikander.
This presentation by Christiane Gruber explores a number of paintings of the Prophet Muhammad produced in Persian and Turkish lands from the fourteenth century to the modern-day. Ranging from veristic to abstract, these images represent Muhammad’s individual traits, primordial luminosity, and veiled essence. Their pictorial motifs reveal that artists engaged in abstract thought and turned to symbolic motifs in order to imagine Muhammad’s primordial origins and prophetic standing. In creating and gazing upon such images, artists and viewers also were inspired by various mystical beliefs and practices, including devotional invocation, in the process seeking to express their piety through both verbal and pictorial language. Within a variety of Islamic expressive cultures, paintings thus have functioned as a powerful means for devotional engagement with Muhammad, the “praiseworthy” Prophet and Messenger of Islam.
Dr. John Seyller, Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont, leads a gallery talk on the dynamic intersection of the tradition of Indian miniature painting and the contemporary videos of Shahzia Sikander, featured artist in Transcendent.
Shahzia Sikander merges the South Asian tradition of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles, creating visually compelling, resonant works. Her multi-scaled imagery crosses boundaries of geography, religion, and style. Sikander earned her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1992 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the San Diego Museum of Art, California; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. Sikander has received many accolades including the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art (2015); MacArthur Fellowship (2006); Inaugural Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellowship, Italy (2009); Joan Mitchell Award (1998–99); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1997); and the Shakir Ali Award from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan (1992). Shahzia Sikander currently resides in New York, NY where she is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery.
Sikander’s pioneering practice takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure and challenges the strict formal tropes of the genre by experimenting with scale and various forms of new media. Trained as a miniaturist at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honoured medium. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander employs the miniature’s continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration. At the NCA, Sikander’s thesis project, the Scroll, launched what has come to be called the neo-miniature, and she was the first woman to teach miniature painting. H er works encompass painting, drawing, animation, installation, video and film. Shahzia Sikander has previously shown at the Aga Khan Museum as part of “Nuit Blanche” (2017) and “Listening to Art, Seeing Music” (2018).
The Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), one of South Asia’s premier cultural events, returns to Asia Society New York for the third year. LLF in New York will explore contemporary Pakistan through artists, writers, and commentators. The festival will present American audiences with a more nuanced view of Pakistan and include discussions on fiction and nonfiction writing, art, architecture, history and politics.
A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories on what it means to be an American from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen: “This chorus of brilliant voices articulating the shape and texture of contemporary America makes for necessary reading” (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies).
On Thursday December 7, UBS will release new findings on the habits of art collectors and their implications in an Investor Watch Pulse Survey
Artwork presentation in the UBS lounge in Miami Beach will showcase UBS Art Collection artist Shahzia Sikander
Sikander, Rick Lowe and Julie Mehretu (RISD MFA ’97) will discuss the cultural landscape from the 1990’s to present day and their part in shaping it. The friends will develop a dialogue about artists supporting artists, collaborations, mentoring, and what lies ahead.
On Friday November 10 at 7 pm, join artist Shahzia Sikander in conversation with Sadia Abbas moderated by Richard Davis as the opening event of Lahore on my Mind, a public festival that moves between the past and the present to explore the early modern, colonial, and contemporary cultural worlds of South Asia.
Shahzia Sikander will be one of many speakers at the 7th Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art on Nov. 2-4 in Richmond, Virginia.
The Art of Independence: Visions of the Future in India and Pakistan A conference held at at the Ashmolean Museum on 12 October 2017 and the Courtauld Institute of Art on 13 October 2017, convened by Faisal Devji and Mallica Kumbera Landrus (University of Oxford) with Deborah Swallow and Zehra Jumabhoy (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London). The conference was co-organised by the Ashmolean Museum, the Courtauld Institute of Art—Sackler Research Forum, the Oxford Centre for Global History and the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College, and co-funded by the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development of Somerville College, the John Fell Fund, the Radhakrishnan Fund, the University Engagement Programme (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), and the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Day 2, Futures Lost and Found: Citizenship and Contemporary Art (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London) Shahzia Sikander in conversation with Faisal Devji
A three- day convening of established and mid career South Asian American artists, academics and curators. Fatal Love: Where Are We Now? examines contemporary art production by artists, academics and curators in the South Asian American diaspora. Although we have had a strong presence in the New York art world for the last two decades, we have yet to engage in a nationwide dialogue. A lack of institutional support and scarcity of full time contemporary art South Asian curators employed in any local museums have prevented generations of artists from forming networks that go beyond the local to a national scale.
On September 8, Shahzia Sikander will speak at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, launching the new season of the Mark and Mary Goff Fiterman Lecture Series.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Shahzia Sikander will participate in a panel discussion on women in printmaking at the New York Public Library's Schwarzman Building on February 4, 2016, 6pm. The event will begin with cocktails and include a tour of the library's current exhibition, chronicling women in printmaking from 1570 to 1900.
The panel will be moderated by Anne Higonnet, Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Barnard. The discussion will also include Pace Prints collaborator April Gornik and Dana Schutz.
Sikander is currently working on her first print edition with Pace Prints, to be published this spring.