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.
The diverse works from eighteen artists will be installed throughout the gallery to eschew singular storytelling and instantiate multiple narratives for our fourth and final exhibition of 2023. Taking as its point of departure the fact that glass as a material fluctuates between solid and liquid, Form and Formless meditates on the slipperiness rather than the fixity of categories of identity (such as gender, sexuality, and race, among others).
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.
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.
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
Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander (RISD MFA 1995, Painting and Printmaking) is internationally celebrated for bringing Indo-Persian miniature-painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary art practice. This exhibition tracks the first 15 years of this artistic journey, from her groundbreaking deconstruction of miniature painting in Pakistan to the development of a new personal vocabulary at RISD, expanded explorations around identity as a Core fellow at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her global outlook during her first years in New York. During this period, Sikander richly interrogated gender, sexuality, race, class, and history, creating open-ended narratives that have sustained her work as one of the most significant artists working today.