Artwork in Pakistan, like its tradition and language, has by no means fairly match the nation state that now accommodates it. As a substitute, it arises from the visible traditions of the Indian subcontinent and the Islamic world, handed by the refining fireplace of worldwide modernism and the productive alienation of political trauma.
Nobody exemplifies this higher than Shahzia Sikander, born in Lahore a technology after the Partition of India (1947) and shifting on to the worldwide stage within the years earlier than 9/11. Alongside her near-contemporary Imran Qureshi, she is among the best-known artists of Pakistani origin alive as we speak. Each are identified for his or her modern miniatures, a style virtually uniquely related to Pakistan and significantly with the Nationwide Faculty of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, one of many oldest artwork colleges in Asia.
Within the mid-Nineteenth century, the British endowed Lahore with a museum and an artwork college: they knew artwork was a potent expression of energy. First, they razed Delhi and Lucknow to the bottom; then they taught Indians to color, print and sculpt. The intention was to protect the aesthetic historical past of the subcontinent whereas inculcating “fashionable”—and due to this fact Western—methods of creating artwork. Within the leafy quadrangles of what was then Lahore’s Mayo Faculty (till 1958), artists have been taught on the Kensington mannequin, whereas the wonders of Agra and Gandhara have been arrayed subsequent door within the Lahore Museum—the Ajaib-Ghar or “Marvel Home”.
Outdated and new align
The NCA, Pakistan’s premier arts establishment, was key to the fertile creative milieu of the Nineteen Sixties, bringing collectively pioneering Cubists like Shakir Ali (1916-75) and traditionalists like Haji Muhammad Sharif (1889-1978), the previous court docket painter of Patiala who may hint a direct lineage of ustads, or lecturers, again to the standard workshops of the Mughal emperors. Right this moment when you stand within the museum’s image gallery, you possibly can see earlier than you the strains and shades of Ali in dialogue with the work of his modern Zainul Abedin, who got here from what’s now Bangladesh, and educated in one in every of undivided India’s different nice artwork colleges, the Authorities Faculty in Calcutta. On the opposite facet of the room, you’ll glimpse the indigenous, syncretic revivalism of the Bengal Faculty of the early twentieth century, which blended the Mughal previous with the affect of Japan and London and the flat Ganges delta. It was from this huge nexus of influences that the modern miniature sprang.
Shahzia Sikander’s Cholee Kay Peechay Kiya? Chunree Kay Neechay Kiya? (What Is underneath the Shirt? What Is underneath the Gown?) (1997)
Courtesy Cincinnati Artwork Museum
Artists like Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941-99), who had pored over his cultural patrimony whereas learning in London, started to take conventional genres in new instructions, taking part in round with the shape and texture—in addition to the aim and which means—of Indo-Persian miniature portray. Shahzia Sikander took it a step additional. In her NCA graduate thesis, a 5ft-long portray on burnished wasli paper, named The Scroll (1989-90), she asserted that visible traditions may have searing private and political salience.
On this handsomely illustrated monograph, artwork historian Jason Rosenfeld picks up the story. Normal Zia ul Haq’s American-backed, Islamic-tinged army dictatorship of Nineteen Eighties did lasting injury to state and society in Pakistan, however it offered a lot inspiration for the nation’s creatives. The Scroll depicts a girl wandering by home settings in a steady narrative. The buildings, lower away in jagged sections, imitate the stylised architectural fantasies of Timurid portray. However, as the attention follows the dreamlike protagonist in her virginal white, the structure takes on an oppressive air, displaying, as Rosenfeld places it, “the cramping actuality… instability and oppressiveness” of Normal Zia’s Pakistan, the place, for the primary time, a girl could possibly be flogged for adultery.
Rosenfeld writes that The Scroll “definitively kick-started the Neo-Miniaturist motion”. This may increasingly overstate the case, though the work actually deploys a broad body of reference—encompassing Herat and Siena and Sikander’s near-contemporary, the Indian painter Nilima Sheikh—within the expression of layered social and psychological truths.
Sikander has taken that fluid, multi-dimensional strategy to all the things she has executed since, abandoning the extra formal conventions of miniature portray in works in numerous media, which problem our perceptions of historical past and aesthetics. Her work has drawn on all the things from the British East India Firm to hip-hop, Muslim womanhood and imperial America, Rubenesque white flesh and the Gopi maidens of Hindu portray within the Punjab.
Command of line and tone
The touchstones of her profession have been the virtuosic transforming of visible references and a productive, very important rigidity between type and which means, conveyed by whole command of line and tone. Rosenfeld brilliantly describes the distinctive cachet of Sikander’s mature work: the “miniature precision” and “equally evocative looseness of the ink” in works on paper, the place the acquainted figures of 500 years of Indo-Persian artwork soften imperceptibly into swirling depths of water-coloured nuance. For Rosenfeld, Sikander’s work “mimics the best way we see the world—ever in flux, by no means static, comprised of many discrete elements”.
Eventually the postcolonial artist should confront the query of id. How is her work linked with historical past and custom and all of the labels of belonging which might be stubbornly affixed to her title? Or ought to she, reasonably, eschew the reductive obligations of “authenticity” and assert herself on the unbounded stage of up to date artwork? Sikander’s work has remained true to its roots, however transcended, challenged and deconstructed them. Right here, the figuring out imprint belongs firmly to the artist herself.
Jason Rosenfeld, Shahzia Sikander, Lund Humphries, 144pp, 100 color & b/w illust., £45 (hb), printed 18 November Cyrus Naji is a contract author and journalist
