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Language remains this inexhaustible reservoir from which
noises, proverbs and stories continue to flow when water is scarce …
For memory and language are places both of sameness and otherness, dwelling
and travelling. Here, Language is the site of return, the warm fabric
of a memory, and the insisting call from afar, back home. But here also,
there, and everywhere, language is a site of change, an evershifting ground.
Trinh T. Minh-ha (1)
The visual language of Shahzia Sikander's drawings and miniatures conveys
the border crossings and expanded boundaries that constitute the fluid
identity of the migrant. Traveling between national, cultural, social,
and personal boundaries, Sikander and artists like her who have left their
country of origin to live in another-she came from Pakistan to America-articulate
the shifting identities they negotiate. Through narratives of home and
displacement, artists of migration demonstrate the physical and psychological
journeys they make between home and a new country. Sikander's visual language
comprises Indian miniature paintings and Muslim and Hindu imagery which
she has co-opted to express the multiple public and private selves of
the immigrant and the hybridity of her experience. While the miniature's
visual roots are apparent-note the small formats, the corporal gestures,
and the figures' dress-Sikander's painting style and subject matter are
fluid and quixotic. She pairs painterly passages of abstraction with recognizable
images. Figures that may start out highly representative often melt into
abstraction. Sikander's abstract painterly gestures affix difference to
the excruciatingly detailed miniatures from Indian traditions. Her mixed
Muslim and Hindu iconography and hybrid painting style suggest that in
her world experience, all mythologies, geographical borders, and cultural
codes can and should be called into question.
In The Scroll, Sikander adopts the formal style of manuscript
painting. Semi-autobiographical, The Scroll depicts Sikander
and other people-perhaps family-maneuvering through domestic life in Lahore,
Pakistan. The broken and varied perspectives are typical of Indian miniatures,
as is the simultaneous view of multiple activities. However, Sikander
integrates her personal and homey intimacy within manuscript painting's
formal construct, changing the nature of the genre and thus blurring the
boundaries between history's then and the present's now.
Home is often an emotionally charged idea for immigrants. They have left
their homes yet struggle to make a new home in a new land, dangling between
conflicting ideologies of that once-familiar and now new and even contested
place. As filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh- ha notes, "Home
for the exile or migrant can hardly be more than a transitional or circumstantial
place, since the 'original' home cannot be recaptured, nor can its
presence/absence be entirely banished in the 'remade' home. Thus, figuratively
but also literally speaking, travelling back and forth between home
and abroad becomes a mode of dwelling. Every movement between here and
there bears with it a movement within a here and a movement within a there."
(2)
The notion of self in relationship to home and new country is also one
of conflicting energies. Vishakha N. Desai, writing about her teenaged
transition as an exchange student between India and Santa Barbara, California,
noted the disparity between her new "Americanized" idea of herself
as private and her struggles for privacy upon her return to India, where
her family expected an open self. She writes, "This dichotomy between
a more familial notion of self, prevalent in much of Asia, and the modern
Western one that defines self as a more autonomous entity is arguably
one of the central qualities of the predicament of the Asian American
experience." (3) In her self-portrait in The Scroll, Sikander
is solitary yet actively participates in the lives of the people around
her, perhaps suggesting both the bicultural identity she will adopt upon
her subsequent move to the United States and how the miniature functions
as a vehicle for transformation.
Sikander's adoption of minature painting is neither nostalgic nor a simple
embracing of her cultural patrimony. Rather, she is driven to bring miniature
painting into the arena of critical inquiry. According to Sikander, the
issues of miniature painting such as how and where imagery developed are
rooted in ambiguity. For instance, she notes that Indian Mughal painting
evolved under Muslim patronage and is easily available for study in Pakistan,
while Hindu Kangra images generally are not. These issues may be obscured
to the casual reader by their inclusion in the histories of Indian Art
in which using the word "India" to describe pre-modern art can
suggest a seamless history. Pakistan's relatively short 50-year history
adds to the entanglement of Pakistani and Indian histories. By recognizing
these blurred boundaries, erasing borders, and merging differing styles
and subjects, Sikander opens a discourse on contested histories.
Sikander's consistent questioning of the traditions of Indian miniature
painting naturally led her to scrutinize Muslim and Hindu imagery and
the effects of their juxtaposition within one work. She deliberately contrasts
the abstract, reserved nature of Muslim art with the expressionistic and
sensual elements of Indian painting, destroying any borders between them
through this intermingling. Thus rigid identification of and claims to
a particular style are diluted. The paradox of identity and especially
of that of Pakistan and its complicated relationship with India is not,
Sikander found, a reality for most Indians, while she, as a Pakistani,
finds it of crucial importance. Combining the vocabulary of Muslim imagery,
such as the veil, with Hindu mythology, she finds that the intersection
of the two provides a new visual language with which to confront problems
of identity and who claims what. The resulting hybridity, rooted in fragments
of each culture, allows Sikander to make connections between cultures
that otherwise might remain buried under post-Partition tension.
Sikander loads her works with images, textures, decorative elements, and
figures that she varies from painting to painting. The veiled griffin
in Ready to Leave, Series II appears in several of Sikander's
works. It is a character, by definition, of hybridity-part eagle, part
lion-underlining the notions of hybrid identities Sikander examines in
her paintings. Of her repeated figures, Sikander notes, "Some of
the recurring symbols in my work, like the shredded veil, the griffin,
the multiarmed goddess with the veiled head and no feet, are laced with
humor, the desire being to displace the stereotype." (4) Disrupting
the trajectoried, stereotyped views of immigrants in America is often
critical to the migrant experience. Overwrought expectations of certain
dress, habits, and religious practice can obscure immigrant identity.
Sikander has noted that once some Americans knew she was from Pakistan,
where the dominant religion is Islam, they asked why she wasn't wearing
a veil, expecting that she would. Thus to simply go about daily life as
an immigrant in America becomes a political act; it is to declare that
one's identity is not fixed within a particular culture, suggesting that
one can have plural and even contradictory identities. Sikander's paintings
and miniatures, as a fusion of Muslim and Hindu imagery and her own contemporary
inquiries and artistic methodologies, convey the struggle to dismantle
facile assumptions and stereotypes about private and public identities.
By stacking Indian miniature painting traditions with her own painterly
investigations and conceptual narratives, Sikander suggests that the time
between then and now no longer exists in any tangible or rigid form. Time
collapses, dragging along cultural attitudes and traditions, which, compressed
with contemporary life and living, sustain the mélange that signifies
Sikander's work. As Salman Rushdie observes about his own book The Satanic
Verses, "Melange … is how newness enters the world. It is the
great possibility that mass migration gives to the world, and I have tried
to embrace it." (5) Sikander's impetus for Venus's Wonderland
was both miniature book illustration—note how the painting
seems to conform to the format of a book page—and the rather bizarre
aspect of children's tales. Sikander was specifically thinking of a story
of a crocodile and a monkey in which both tried to coerce the other to
their territory, suggesting her own desire to exchange cultural icons.
As in all her works, the symbolism evolved, figures were added, taken
from other works, and fragmented to exist within this particular painting.
In Venus's Wonderland, all the figures are veiled, including
the primate dangling by his tail. Of the veiled figures, Sikander notes,
" The veiled figure refers to different levels of women's experiences.
It is a marriage veil, it is a dressed form. It is a celebration of femaleness
and not about oppression! It is a far cry from how some viewers perceive
it—it isn't symbolic of women's traditional roles or symbolic of
my own experience. It isn't a political symbol; it is supposed to represent
a universal experience. I paint it with memories of childhood in my mind,
of growth." (6) The veil is critical to Sikander's works, for it
appears in many of her paintings. Yet it is, in her words, "buoyant,"
allowing the forms to float in space, to exist where they might otherwise
not. (7) The veil often shifts into wings, or clothing, and when placed
on a monkey or a griffin, even becomes humorous. The veil is also almost
always white and threaded, Sikander's formal choice that links her works
to each other. Conceptually the veil is rooted in her own experiences
as an immigrant in America and is a direct response to the questions she
bore about not wearing a veil. In 1993–94 performative actions,
Sikander wore a veil in public spaces such as airports and "other
strange zones," (8) finding that people treated her enormously differently
once she was veiled. The device allowed her to experience not only complete
anonymity, but her own identity fluctuations which changed according to
other's perceptions of her. Just as we may adopt a different persona when
we wear a particular article of clothing-leather clothing may excite feelings
of dominance-Sikander felt the identity change that an article of clothing
may engender, demonstrating that clothing is a powerful vehicle by which
to manipulate identity and others people's judgment of who we are based
on what we may cover our bodies with. Thus the shifting female figures
in her works that have veils, wings, flowing gowns, and no feet, are deliberately
dislocated, yet self-dependent. Sikander's intentional shape-shifting
allows them to remain identity-less and mutable, demonstrating how identity
is fluid, sometimes rootless, and can exist on the surface of things.
Sikander's shifting and accumulative images sustain agency in all the
works, creating a coherent body of related imagery. Like all of her paintings,
Venus's Wonderland is a transgressive apparatus by which Sikander
manipulates traditions-cultural, geographical, and painterly-leaving any
ultimate conclusion indeterminate. Sikander builds a connective language
from the vocabulary of fragmented images. In Sikander's works, we may
excavate layers of meaning in the interstices between Pakistan and India,
Muslim and Hindu, representation and abstraction, then and now, here and
there.
Dana Self
Curator
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