Shahzia Sikander SpiNN

6' 30''

Shahzia Sikander is a Pakistani-American artist known, above all, for her contemporary interpretations of the traditional Indo-Persian miniature discipline with diverse means of expression. Her works include digital animations, videos, performances, large scale murals, installations, projections, drawings on paper and prints on subjects that include some of the major issues of our time: tensions between the postcolonial condition and cultural hybridization, between the experience of migration and the birth of nations, and between geopolitics and religion. In 2001, Shahzia Sikander began to work with video animation and video installations, which she used to analyze the form and structure of her artistic endeavors based on drawing. A high-resolution scan transformed the image on paper into a digital animation, combining the organic drawing with the artificial one. "SpiNN" is a pun on the name of the cable news company CNN. Numerous female figures, the Gopi or followers of the god Khrisna, are depicted against a background representing the space traditionally reserved for men at the Indian Moghul dynasty court. The first images of these women in the work of Shahzia Sikander date back to 2001, but it is in this work that such iconography becomes more important. Separating the women’s hair from their bodies and using it as a constitutive element of the work, the artist analyzes the implications of the fragmentation of an image and the change of context for a symbolical figure.

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I. Berry, J. Hough (eds.), Shahzia Sikander-Nemesis, exhibition catalogue (Saratoga Springs, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery), Saratoga Springs 2004. H. Bhabha, S. Kissane (eds.), Shahzia Sikander, exhibition catalogue (Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art), Milan 2007. C. Brandon (ed.), Shahzia Sikander: Apparatus of Power, exhibition catalogue (Hong Kong, Asia Society), Hong Kong 2016. H. Hanru, A. Palopoli (eds.), Ecstasy as Sublime, Heart as Vector, exhibition catalogue (Rome, MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Venice 2016.

Foto Giuseppe Schiavinotto

Purchased from Brent Sikkema Gallery, New York

Video