The New York-based Shahzia Sikander will speak about her multi-media artworks. Sikander’s pioneering practice takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as its point of departure and challenges the strict formal tropes of the genre by experimenting with scale and various forms of new media. Trained as a miniaturist at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honoured medium. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander employs the miniature’s continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration. At the NCA, Sikander’s thesis project, the Scroll, launched what has come to be called the neo-miniature, and she was the first woman to teach miniature painting. H er works encompass painting, drawing, animation, installation, video and film. Shahzia Sikander has previously shown at the Aga Khan Museum as part of “Nuit Blanche” (2017) and “Listening to Art, Seeing Music” (2018).
After the talk, Sikander will join a panel discussion on Art & Politics with Zehra Jumabhoy, Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld and Sadia Abbas, Associate Professor of Post-Colonial Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. The discussion will be chaired by Faisal Devji, Professor of Modern South Asian History at Oxford University.
The Talks will be followed by a drinks reception.
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Organised by Dr Zehra Jumabhoy (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, as well as Pilar Corrias gallery, London.
