Shahzia Sikander with her Reckoning, displayed as part of Times Square’s Midnight Moment, in September 2023
Photo: Vincent Tullo
In this podcast, based on The Art Newspaper's regular interview series, our host Ben Luke talks to artists in-depth. He asks the questions you've always wanted to: who are the artists, historical and contemporary, they most admire? Which are the museums they return to? What are the books, music and other media that most inspire them? And what is art for, anyway?
Shahzia Sikander talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work.
Sikander, born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, trained in the tradition of Indo-Persian manuscript painting and has used its forms, techniques and language as a launchpad for a wide-ranging engagement with colonial and postcolonial histories, with feminism, gender and sexuality, and with cultural identity and narratives around race.
Shahzia Sikander's Witness (2023) in Madison Square Park for Havah…to breathe, air, life (2023)
Photo: Yasunori Matsui, courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy
Working in drawing, painting, animation, video, mosaic and most recently sculpture, she has created a body of work in which existing and invented images and forms are juxtaposed to vivid and poetic effect. Technically exquisite and conceptually profound, her works have an instant impact but reward slow looking with layered narratives, references and histories.
Shahzia Sikander, Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off (1998)
© Shahzia Sikande
She discusses her early discovery of Michelangelo in Lahore, explains how she has channelled the “soulfulness” Eva Hesse found in minimalism in her response to historic manuscript painting, reflects on the importance of her teenage experience of Mogadishu, Somalia, and speaks about the enormous importance of poetry to her work, including the US writer Adrienne Rich's translations of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib.
Shahzia Sikander, Empire Follows Art:States of Agitation 8 (2020)
© Shahzia Sikander
Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including which artwork, if she could only have one, she would most like to live with.
