Lounge
Artist Shahzia Sikander’s unapologetic approach to body politics
Summary
A comprehensive survey of the artist’s practice in Venice spotlights her engagement with the subcontinent’s colonial history and her focus on gender politics
The Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in Venice is serving as a backdrop to a comprehensive mid-career survey of Pakistani-American artist, Shahzia Sikander. Titled Collective Behaviour, the show spans three-and-a-half decades of her practice. The artist, who reflects on colonial histories of the subcontinent, and draws inspiration from miniature traditions and manuscripts, was in the news recently for vandalism of her work in the US.
“At 3 am on July 8, a man with a hammer decapitated an 18-foot sculpture of a woman at the University of Houston. I made this sculpture, and I called it“Witness" as an allegory of the power — or rather the lack of power — that women are accorded within the justice system. In an unexpected way, “Witness" has lived up to its name," wrote Sikander in a July-30 piece in The Washington Post. This work had been commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy and the Public Art of the University of Houston System, but has since then earned the ire of right-wing and pro-life groups.
The female figure and the fractures in the world that we live in have been central to her practice, irrespective of the medium that she works in. Sikander trained in traditional miniature drawing and painting at the National College of the Arts, Lahore. However, ever since she moved to the US in the early nineties, she has explored a range of media from print, digital animation and mosaic to sculpture and glass work. This exhibition in Venice, put together by a couple of Ohio based museums—the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, with support from Sean Kelley Gallery—, aims to burnish her credentials as one of the leading South Asian diaspora artists.
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The Palazzo provides a breathtaking marquee setting for the show. While many Venetian palazzos have been repurposed as collateral venues for recent Venice Biennale editions, this one is a remarkable example of both survival and restoration. Located near theChiesa diSanta Maria dei Miracoli (Church of Saint Mary of Miracles), off thePonte Delle Herbe (Bridge of the Herbs), its façade faces the canal on two sides. The current palazzo was built in the late 15th century by an influential Venetian trader, Nicolo Soranzo, who made his fortunes as his galleys traded with the east. It later passed into the hands of a Dutch merchant family from Axel, which explains the unconventional double-barrelled name. The space retains its late Venetian Gothic character, with its large open courtyard and the staircase, the decorated wooden ceilings and the ornate fireplaces, with some remnants from an earlier Byzantine period as well.
The curation grapples with this sumptuous but intricate space, thematically presenting the show in four partswith themesdivided across multiple rooms, which often come across as disjointed. The smaller works in paper, an essential element of Sikander’s practice from her early years, also struggle to find an effective way to be presented in this grandiosesun-lit environment and yearn for a more intimate setting. What stands out, however, is the recurrence of the artist’s visual language—motifs, concepts and ideas across themes combined with the soulful music that seeps through the rooms, providing a unifying thread sensorially.
The first section, ‘Point of Departure’, covers her early engagement with manuscript illustrations and showcases how she has retained and refined the skills and motifs over time. The two notable works includeScroll(1989-1990), which she made as part of her undergraduate thesis in Lahore, and the more recent Disruption as Rapture (2016), which was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The latter, a ten-minute video, is derived by animating images from the illustrated manuscriptGulshan-i-Ishq (The Rose Garden of Love). A testament to the syncretic traditions of the subcontinent, it was written by Sufi poet Nusrati, who adapted a north Indian love story for an Islamic court based in southern India, using both Indian and Persian literary traditions.
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The second section, ‘The Feminine Space’, is presented more cohesively. It includes well-known works, which are identifiable by the floating female figure, often depicted with roots for feet or as rising from a lotus flower. The tour-de-force is NOW (2023), which was earlier installed on the roof of the Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The patinated bronze sculpture is placed at the entrance of the open courtyard, and also visible to viewers as they climb the stairs to reach thepiano nobile, where the rest of the exhibition is.
The third section, ‘Negotiated Landscapes and Contested Histories’, is spread across four rooms and considers the entanglements of our colonial past, which continue to haunt us even today. In Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), an 11th-century Indian celestial dancer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York is coupled with the Mannerist Bronzino Venus from the allegory painting in the National Gallery in London. The dancer rests on Venus, while the latter looks up and playfully tugs the dancer’s necklace with her index finger. These were originally made on paper by Sikander as Maligned Monsters II in 2000, and are part of her desire to reimagine decolonisation as a process which is inclusive and creates intimate connections rather than a more fractured world of fixed and polarised identities.
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The fourth section,‘Collective Behaviour’, which the exhibition derives its title from, echoes the same kinship systems between experience, consciousness, race and culture while taking a global feminist perspective according to a note by the artist accompanying the exhibition. Sikander’s works have always attempted a profound non-binary and globally feminist approach towards gender and body politics. But for someone who has repeatedly engaged with the question around decolonization, the nature of her engagement with the American museums appears to raise other questions. The fact that the dancer from the MET has now been processed for restitution back to India due to it having been illicitly smuggled to the USmight give Sikander cause for reflection on how she engages with museums and cultural objects from the subcontinent in her practice.
The exhibition, ‘Collective Behaviour ’,runs at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, Venice till 20 October.
Anindo Sen is an independent art and culture writer.
