Shahzia Sikander at Brent Sikkema - Pakistani-American artist exhibition, New York

In her first show at the Brent Sikkema Gallery, Shahzia Sikander, best known for her unconventional application of traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting techniques, continued her subversive and witty cross-cultural dialogue. A pair of digitally animated drawings and over two dozen works on paper explored timely questions of hybridity and nationalism.

The show's centerpiece was the installation SpiNN, an earlier version of which appeared in 2001 at San Antonio's ArtPace. Two parallel white freestanding walls, set on a diagonal in the center of the gallery's main room precisely four feet apart, created a confined corridor that magnified the unresolved tension between a digital animation and a Wasli paper drawing. On a flat DVD monitor affixed to the wall at eye level, a parade of imps, lovers and other colorful personages taken from traditional, imaginary and mass-media sources faded in and out against a slowly mutating background of a Mughal throne room and a wide-open landscape. The title of the installation refers to the central episode in the animation, when dozens of nude gopis (the female attendants to the Hindu god Krishna) disappear, until only their black hairdos remain. Like Braque's bird silhouettes, these forms begin to multiply into a dense flock that rotates counterclockwise, emphasizing the Pakistan-born artist's fascination with shape shifting and metamorphosis. Hung on the corridor's other wall directly opposite the DVD monitor, the complementary drawing looked like a still from the animation, with the added element of a female figure of Justice, bearing sword and scale and presiding over a host of gopis.

A second room contained 26 drawings and watercolors that elaborated Sikander's liberal appropriations and personal iconography. "Pink Pavilion" is a suite of 18 works on various shades of pink and white handmade paper. The series demonstrates Sikander's continual play with forms such as gopi hairpieces and armless human figures. No Fly Zone, a small watercolor and dry pigment on Wasli paper, undermines the tired terminology of East and West by freely conflating diverse imagery, in this case industrial trusses, Pegasus, shadowy plunging devils, and angels with wings painted in the Stars and Stripes, all arrayed in a typically craggy Indo-Persian landscape.

In a second DVD, an elephant, slowly rendered from an Arcimboldo-esque collage of dozens of lesser animals, falls to pieces in the end. A New York City resident, trained in Lahore in the grand tradition of miniature painting, Sikander probes the fateful ruptures of translation.

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