SHAHZIA SIKANDER – WEEPING WILLOWS, LIQUID TONGUES
2020-11-09Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues is an expansive, in-depth look into Sikander’s recent work, featuring the artist’s dynamic largeand-intimately-scaled drawings, a captivating new single channel video-animation, luminous, intricate mosaics and her first ever free-standing sculpture. Shahzia Sikander takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as the point of departure for her work. From premodern beginnings to contemporary influences, it is precisely this historical continuum and its continuous capacity for reinvention that has sparked Sikander’s visually rich engagement in multiple media. The works in the exhibition explore tensions
between power and powerlessness to present transformative ideas. Sikander’s interest in sociology, psychoanalysis, and the examination of how culture and society shape the imagination is all fodder for her work. The ways in which violence, systemic racism, class and cultural fears are deeply entrenched in media and political representations, be it the fear of the unknown, the migrant, the immigrant, the Muslim, the LGBTQ community, the ‘other’ and the various fault lines of race, class and gender also intersect within her work.
Opposite – Arose, 2020
Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2020
Sean Kelly
475 Tenth Avenue
NY 10018
New York
