Continuing through January 25, 2026
Shahzia Sikander’s towering, jaw-dropping sculpture, “NOW” (2023), is displayed in the entryway of the museum, where it exerts a commanding presence. A gleaming, golden female figure, over eight feet in height, it is part human, part alien, with looping, rootlike limbs and giant thrusting coils of hair. The curling forms also suggest ram’s horns. Disturbingly, there were some who saw the ram, and, by extension, the sculpture, as a satanic symbol, and/or a “radical feminist” statement, and these people reacted to the work as evil and menacing. A later version, titled “Witness,” in fact, was not only defamed but decapitated in an act of vandalism in 2024 while installed at the University of Houston.
Sikander is no stranger to living under hostile conditions, having grown up under the repressive regime of Muhammed Zia-ul-Haq, who had assumed rule of the artist’s native Pakistan in a military coup in 1977. Invoking martial law, Zia revoked constitutional rights instituted four years earlier. Zia’s act, in particular, relegated women to subordinate status. The subsequent Hudood Ordinances (1979) made it extremely difficult for women to prosecute rape and assault, and the Qanun-e-Shahadat (1984) further reduced legal rights, according a woman’s testimony half the worth of a man’s.
Trained in traditional miniature painting at the National Academy of Art in Lahore, Sikander emigrated to the US in 1993 and settled in New York in the late 90s. Sikander’s work was quickly well received, with inclusion in shows at Deitch Projects and the Drawing Center. In the Whitney Biennial of 1997 she was praised by Roberta Smith in the New York Times for her “feminist verve and breathtaking skill.” As luck would have it, her meteoric rise came to a screeching halt in the wake of the 9/11 attacks due to the racist, Islamophobic fallout that followed. As a Muslim artist, she found her upcoming shows “postponed” indefinitely and commission opportunities evaporated.
Sikander’s traveling retrospective, “Collective Behavior,” features Neo-Miniaturist work including scrolls, oversized versions of manuscript paintings, gouaches and mixed-media works, prints, sculptures, glass pieces, mosaics, and digital animations.
Her undergraduate thesis work in Lahore, “The Scroll,” was completed in 1988-90. In it, she expands the usually compact format into a dense, immersive piece only 13 1/2 inches high by over five feet long.
An autobiographical female character appears, with loose hair and flowing white gown, seemingly focused on the journey ahead. Ghostlike, she is at times fully or partially transparent. Non-traditional narratives, featuring diverse groupings of people and animals, reveal Sikander’s feminist orientation, a rejection of regimented gender roles and equally of kitschy clichés. A tiny female painter works on a self-portrait.
Sikander’s numerous recurring devices include a female figure with looping “tentacles” in place of limbs, expressing the way women have of necessity been rooted internally, carrying their culture and its stories within themselves through unpredictable circumstances and dislocations. Winged female figures, gopis, also inhabit many of Sikander’s works. Traditionally they are cow-herders, symbolizing unconditional devotion to Krishna. Sikander presents them as liberated from their duties, an example being a boatload of them sculling down a river in a virtuosic “Gendered Currents: Gopi Regatta” (2024) an amazingly rendered and singularly lighthearted drawing.
They also are featured prominently in “Disruption as Rapture” (2016), a digital animation. Based on an 18th-century story “Gulshan-i ‘Isha” (The Rose Garden of Love), it uses love as a metaphor for the soul’s search for the divine, superimposing textures and objects, leaves, flowers, and figures, that swirl and morph as stylized clouds and abstract pink dots roll by. Here and in other works, the birdlike forms of the gopi hairstyles eventually swarm and take flight in a life of their own. Individual participation in a group dynamic, the way collective entities as well as solid objects may form, interact, and disperse, is another prevalent theme.
Recalling time under British rule, the Raj period, which began in 1858 and ended in 1947 when India gained independence and was summarily divided into India and Pakistan, Sikhander employs a faceless figure in a red waistcoat, “The Company Man,” to symbolize the repressive East India Company. The after-effects of British colonial rule inform works such as “Self-Mirage” (2011), a large work on paper, and a related digital animation, “The Last Post” (2010). Her video installation, “Parallax” (2013), hinges on another political theme, international conflicts over the Strait of Hormuz. The term “parallax” itself refers to the apparent shift in an object’s position when viewed from two different locations, and the immersive cinematic experience is compelling. This HD digital animation features sound design by Du Yun and animation by Patrick O’Rourke. Collaboration with other artists has become an integral part of Sikander’s process.
From the Latin root word promiscuus, meaning mixed, not separated, the sculpture “Promiscuous Intimacies” (2020) depicts two female figures, their bodies entwined, gazing toward each other. The lower figure is based on Agnolo Bronzino’s painting, “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid” (c. 1545), and the upper, an 11th century sandstone temple sculpture fragment from Madhya Pradesh, India. Along with disrupting assumptions about gender roles, this work reminds us of the issue of repatriation taking place within the museum community. (The sculptural fragment, stolen in 1980 prior to its donation to the Metropolitan Museum, was returned to India in March, 2023.) Between the fierce independence of “NOW,” and the gracious inclusivity of “Promiscuous Intimacies,” the exhibition is bookended by striking images of non-traditional female agency.
Sikander’s work is extremely powerful, and empowering, particularly for anyone who identifies with the experience of finding oneself “othered,” stereotyped, unseen, or dismissed. Still, the pervading atmosphere of the show is playful and invigorating, radiating heightened awareness and unconditional acceptance, although laced with painful shards of bitterness and recrimination. We would love to have a world where everyone is empowered with equal rights and opportunity. But that is certainly not the case now. Sikander’s work speaks eloquently for those whose voices have been muted.
