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Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander at the Asia Society - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney
"Conversations with Traditions" featured two female painters--one Indian, one Pakistani--who work in the miniature tradition. However, the exhibition demonstrates that "tradition" can be a loaded term. In the postcolonial world, traditional art forms have come to be identified with nationalism, and they often serve as tools for contemporary artists wishing to explore complex issues of politics, cultural identity and personal experience.
While exemplifying this phenomenon, the show also asks: whose tradition? Nilima Sheikh is an Indian artist whose family had to flee what is now Pakistan following the partition of the subcontinent upon independence in 1947. Shahzia Sikander, who is a generation younger, was raised in Pakistan and now lives in the U.S. These facts of time and geography have shaped the way they deal with the miniature tradition.
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As an art student in Pakistan, Sikander became adept at mingling antithetical styles. Given the political and religious tensions that separate Pakistan and India, the juxtaposition of motifs from the Hindu Rajput tradition with Muslim references from Mughal painting creates a dissonance, one that her American audiences may not grasp.
Works in Sikander's section of the exhibition range from pieces produced right after art school to new commissions for this show. With the exception of the most recent work, she employs mixes of vegetable dye, dry pigment, watercolor, gold leaf and even tea on traditional wasli paper, and in most cases keeps to the manuscript-page scale and format of traditional miniatures. The earliest work here is The Scroll (1991), a long, horizontal painting that departs from this format to provide a vision of the interior of a many-chambered modern Pakistani house. The architecture has been opened up and stretched out on a single plane so that we can follow the progress of a mysterious white-clad figure from room to room. The painting is remarkable both for its detail and its dreamlike rhythm. By the mid '90s, Sikander was mixing Mughal, Rajput and Western motifs in tightly painted collagelike compositions. Mythical beasts, naked women in translucent veils, Hindu goddesses and snatches of landscape are dismantled, laid on top of each other and intermixed in a way that parallels the complex nature of the artist's own hybrid identity. In one recent work, two snake-bodied figures seem imprisoned behind a pair of guns whose barrels have been twisted into a pretzel shape; in another, a woman in a sari and a Western nude face off beneath a host of Asian angels. In a digital work on a computer screen, a traditional-looking tableau of a woman and a long-horned ibex is the base for a kaleidoscopic collection of slowly changing images, texts and symbols.
Sheikh, whose work is shaped by her exposure to traditional Indian tales and folk songs as well as actual events, gives a greater emphasis to narrative. Her fluid paintings of tempera on handmade paper feature loosely drawn figures and landscape elements in diaphanous fields of delicately washed color. The earliest work here, the 12-panel When Champa Grew Up (1984), is based on both a true story and a folk song. It illustrates the "dowry murder" of a young bride by her in-laws. We see the heroine progress from a playful schoolgirl on a bicycle to an abused young wife cowering in her husband's family's household and then set ablaze in the kitchen. In the last two panels, hired mourners in a tight black circle raise their arms toward the heavens as she rises above the smoke like an ascending angel.
More recent works touch on other aspects of female suffering. Another piece, also based on a true story, depicts a group of despairing women who somberly climb a staircase to cast themselves into a large well. The rosy tints and delicate lines that define setting and figures imbue the tragic scene with a dreamlike quality. Other works show, with the same rhetorical reserve, houses obliterated, women being abducted and exiles trudging across an empty land.
This was an inspired pairing. Together, Sikander and Sheikh make a powerful case for the continued relevance of traditional art forms by dismantling the supposed dichotomy between old and new.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
