Shahzia Sikander by Katina Green

Shahzia Sikander was born in Pakistan in 1969. She studied and trained in the process of Indian and Persian miniature paintings. This style of painting takes 20-30 layers of water-based pigments for them to be created. The paper is stained with tea in layers taking many layers alone to stain the paper even before any of the drawing and painting begins. Shahzia is not only known for her miniatures and videos but also for her wall installations with layers of her work. These installations and layering of her works are what lead to her videos. Thus, later in 2001, she began playing around with animation and combing her miniatures layered together on a larger scale. She began creating these amazing videos of her works in motion combined with music. Her work is about transformation, taking something apart, and merging her miniature painting style and minimalist abstraction. Some of her videos range from the abstract to the illustrated. In her videos, she tries to use as many drawing as she can to make these works. Meaning she uses hundreds of her drawings layered to form these works. I found myself drawn to this artist due to her combing of cultural and political boundaries. She does this with such amazing beauty and sound. Of all the types of works, Shahzia is known for I believe my favorite is her videos. They elicit emotion and thought from them in ways that seem to draw you in. Shahzia stated that one of her most challenging things has been taking her traditional art form and making it more accessible and contemporary. She has achieved this by technology, using her idea of a mirage and the understanding that a larger projection is more than just size she began to change how she approached drawing these images for her videos. Once she started playing with such a dramatic change in size she stated, “It was breaking out of the preciousness around my process and testing the viability of a form,” she says of enlarging an image from ten inches to ten feet, and “seeing whether it gains more momentum or maybe becomes more confrontational.”

The still above is from one of her breath-taking videos called Parallax it is over 15 minutes long. This particular still is about the trade relations of China and the East Indian company over opium. Later the soldier explodes showing the end of this venture. In the Singing Suns, the image shown below, with all its moving stills relates the forethought and planning it takes to complete one of these ideas. I found myself being drawn back into watching the clips I could find again and again, then trying to find more so I could see the whole thing. This is something that has excited me in what I wish to do with my art.

This still is from Singing Suns. https://vimeo.com/218210266

“Sikander’s stories swing between individual and universal experience, between technique and genre, and include poetry, opera, and even contemporary hip-hop. As she herself maintains: “The blurred borders between fiction and non-fiction, storytelling and historiography are all essential in the human search for truth”