Art Guide

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March/April 2010

A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that showcase Asian art, Read More

Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More

The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More

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Shahzia Sikander

By Tracey Clement

Serious travellers like to distinguish themselves from mere tourists. While tourists will join a frenzied circuit, eager to hit the hot spots in a bid to capture iconic snapshots just to prove, “I was there”, a seasoned traveller will avoid fellow foreigners like the plague, shun the human ant trails queuing up at monuments and museums and try to get cosy with the locals in an attempt to experience something authentic and different. The idea is to return home subtly changed; somehow new and improved by having soaked up some essential essence of somewhere else, romantic notion easily summed up by a handy cliché: while tourism is about the destination, travelling is all about the journey.
The migrant’s experience is decidedly more complex. The destination is the journey, and it’s a ride which never stops. Moving from one country to another, crash landing in a new culture, is a process of continual
flux. You never really arrive, instead you remain in a permanent virtual transit lounge: a perpetual state of transition. Eventually you become a hybrid creature, equally comfortable in two homes, both old and new, and able to move easily between cultures, but simultaneously slightly out of place and vaguely exotic, everywhere.
Shahzia Sikander was born in Pakistan, and after spending nearly half of her adult life and most of her artistic career in the USA, she revels in this fluid, transitional existence. As she explains, “I enjoy it, I
don’t necessarily want to belong anywhere.” For Sikander, being something of an outsider in both her country of origin and where she makes her home is something of an advantage, “It allows you an objectivity…It’s a stimulating environment. Lack of familiarity and comfort is always great.”
After majoring in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Sikander moved overseas “to get a break from Pakistan, a break in the sense of how to have some distance from my familiar situation.” Having initially considered London, Sikander found herself in the USA after exhibiting in the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC. In the US she found what she had instinctively been looking for, “I realised it was a completely different environment, there was a different type of freedom, I felt, where one could step outside one’s ethnicity. I was free floating and I could determine contexts for myself.”

Land-Escapes, Series 3: #3, 2005, ink and gouache on prepared paper, 15.2 x 25.4 cm. LAC Collection, image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,New York © the artist.

Sikander’s desire not to be pinned down, either culturally or artistically, is a major part of what drives her as an artist. She initially came to critical attention through her precise and delicate miniature paintings which reflect an urge to blur boundaries and transcend what Sikander describes as the 'simplistic' nature of binary oppositions such as East/West, traditional/ contemporary and high/low art. Sikander is often quoted as declaring that she took up miniature painting in 1988, a then neglected art form languishing in the realms of kitsch, as “an act of
defiance.” When asked if she is still defiant she replies with a deadpan, “no”. Yet, she is still interested in pushing the parameters of her genre.
In recent years, Sikander has begun painting massive site specific pieces on gallery walls. As she says, the content of miniatures is, “heroic enough to be larger in scale.” Like her smaller pieces, these giant paintings are a potent brew of multicultural fragments including: deities from the Hindu pantheon, references to the Western cannon of art history, Islamic text, current affairs and the highly decorative, stylised floral patterns of traditional Indo-Persian miniatures. But unlike her little jewel like paintings and drawings, Sikander’s giant pieces won’t last and the fact that they are temporary is a deliberate strategy.
Sikander explains that in the beginning the ephemeral nature of these works was a way of engaging with the inherent notions of preciousness tied up with miniatures. But she soon found that working on site created a dynamic and creatively charged atmosphere, “I think the minute you stretch a canvas and put paint on it you are engaging with the history of painting. (But on the wall ) the absolute freedom that you have is unchallenged. You know that you yourself are more likely perhaps to make a mistake in public.” Sikander clearly thrives on this heady combination of experimentation, freedom and risk, saying, “It’s a very time sensitive, high energy driven process. It kind of demands decision making at a different pace…and I think that kind of confrontation is quite exciting.”
Having finished her beautiful temporary painting at the MCA, the newest piece in a survey exhibition which traces fifteen years of her creativity, Sikander is on the move again. Ready to explore new contexts, she is headed for Berlin where she will live and work for several years; just another destination on her endless journey.

The Illustrated Page (edition #1), (detail), 2005–06, gouache and hand painting, gold leaf, silk-screened

Works by Shahzia Sikander can be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney until 17 February.

Tracey Clement is an artist and writer currently living in Sydney.