Shahzia Sikander

Few artists have so fundamentally transformed the form they were trained in as Shahzia Sikander, who took the centuries-old discipline of Central and South Asian manuscript painting and made it entirely, irreversibly new.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1969, Sikander trained at the National College of Arts, where she earned a BFA in 1991. Her breakthrough thesis work, The Scroll, 1989–90, received national critical acclaim. The work brought about a consideration of the Central and South Asian manuscript painting tradition on entirely new terms; what Sikander achieved would eventually launch the form known today as ‘neo-miniature’. Following this early success, Sikander was appointed to teach miniature painting at NCA in 1992 alongside her own master, Bashir Ahmed, becoming the first woman, and the first of his students, ever to do so. She left for the United States shortly after, receiving an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, and has been based in New York City ever since.

Sikander’s practice over the past three decades has been a sustained act of expansion across painting, video animation, mosaic and sculpture. Iconoclastic in nature, her work moves through gender, sexuality, racial narratives and colonial histories, engaging ideas of language, trade, empire and migration through fluid and surreal permutations. It is postmodern in its appetite, feminist in its convictions, and has been pivotal in establishing art of the South Asian diaspora as a strand of the contemporary American tradition, while simultaneously achieving global significance, garnering widespread critical acclaim and achieving prominence worldwide.