Vasıf Kortun: It was in 1996 that we first met, at the Core Residency Program of the Glassell School of Art in Houston. I was a visiting critic and you had recently graduated from RISD. I had just worked on an exhibition with Kara Walker at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum at Bard College. Kara was another RISD graduate, I believe a year ahead of you.
Meeting you was nothing short of an epiphany. I remember vividly the drawings scattered all over the studio and going through a mighty (Western) book of illuminated manuscripts. We spoke about your schooling in Lahore, of traditional disciplines being overlooked and confined as a subdivision in the art school. You had made a double transgression by a willful aloofness to education in “modern fine arts” and studied miniature painting. Women artists studying miniature painting was anything but usual. We sat on the floor and leveled with the work. You told me of your days at RISD, the unique burden of being a woman from Pakistan in an advanced art school, that you had embraced traditional garb for a day as a performance. I made comparisons with the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Pakistan and Turkey had their share of coup d’etats and partnered in the Cento alliance with Iran against the Soviets. Their relationship to modernity was radically proscriptive and unresolved, and the place of Islam for urbanized middle-classes that we were both from begged a candid conversation.
Shahzia Sikander: I recall our studio visit vividly. Your perspective was pointedly different from American artists and critics. We talked about the work without the myopic lens of identity. I also remember that the critique was harsh, and I was challenged but appreciative of engaging without the obligatory need for translations and explanations.
A Turk and a Pakistani meet in Texas. How did you get to Houston after Rhode Island?
SS: I had moved to Houston in August 1995, driving myself with a few belongings that summer in a cheap Red Hyundai Kia purchased in Providence. It was my first road trip in the USA and I had made sure to drive across the skyline in Virginia and make specific stops, like in Charleston, Nashville, Montgomery, and through Mississippi and Louisiana. I was reading about American civil rights movement and black power. One Empire was looming over another, Britain over America. Colonial and imperial histories. The Jim Crow battle, though an American story was resonate with the struggles and freedom movements of colonized people around the world.
Racial and economic divisions encapsulated in the places and cities that I observed started expanding my understanding of America. Driving as a young Pakistani Muslim woman through the landscape of America’s past and present ghosts was a surreal experience, a conflicting sense of foreignness and familiarity. To read and learn about the intimacy of violence in the history of slavery and genocide and imperial wars was a starkly different experience from the two years in Providence’s international student environment of RISD and Brown. The American landscape, to me could not be separated from my understanding of the US foreign policy aka, American involvement across the globe as it affected the geopolitical education of one’s identity as a Pakistani.
At that time, I had also lost my pocketbook with my Pakistani Passport and US visa when my car was broken into and I had no other ‘legal’ documents than a pending green card application in the US immigration labyrinth. I cannot imagine traveling in that manner now with no immediate paperwork on hand amidst the current incendiary anti-immigrant and Muslim ban rhetoric.
What brought you to the US and RISD? You grew up in post-Zulfikar Ali Bhutto times when everything started falling apart.
I had come to the US in 1993 from Lahore on standby ticket courtesy Pakistan government to accompany my work which was being displayed at the Pakistani Embassy as part of their March 23rd festivities which in Pakistan commemorated the Lahore Resolution of 1940 which called for greater Muslim autonomy in British India marking the official adoption of Pakistan’s first constitution and later the dominion status of Pakistan into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1956.
1980’s in Pakistan had very much shaped me as a young adult. One had started witnessing the devastating socio-political changes perpetrated, the warmongering and international military budgets policing the world. Pakistan was under Zia’s military dictatorship from the late 1970s. During the Soviet–Afghan-US-Pak War [1978–1992], the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with Zia declaring that military rule was eventually for the benefit of the nation and the aiding of the freedom fighters, the mujahideen opponents of the pro-Soviet regimes became more visible as the ensuing radicalization and the destruction of the people and the region started to take on an ugly reality.
US military presence in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan started to seep in the Pakistani culture from anti-communist propaganda, military importance narrative, incessant institutionalization of religion, corruption to expensive foreign US products in the local markets. The emergence of Hudood ordinances, which limited women’s rights as a result of this war, also loomed large. The ordinances were counter to the personal experience one grew up with regarding belief and spirituality, the intrinsic mix of secular, spiritual Muslim-ness that I experienced in my immediate family and community.
The diminishing of women’s rights, blasphemy laws, the Islamization project, the polarized public and private spaces discouraged dissent and creative expression. I was inspired by women leaders like my aunt, Asma Jehangir, the human rights activist, while a high school student at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. One of my first mentors even before joining the National College of Arts in Lahore was the late artist Lala Rukh. She was a founding member of the Women Action Forum. Being a part of WAF gave me substantial insight into women’s rights and issues, as well as a broader grasp on the intersections of community and art. It was not surprising for me to find a natural place of connection at the Project Row Houses in Houston. It was a shining example of the local community and collectives operating outside of the traditional spaces of power and narrative, where the local and everyday functioned as sites of transformation, where women, students, third ward residents, artists of color, thinkers, poets, musicians, social activists would come about and engage. Reflecting upon gender, race, class and language differences as a means of contact, I was actively seeking overlapping diasporas in the American landscape of racial differences.
The concept of “overlapping diasporas” has a specific historical resonance. Could you tell me more about how it impacted you?
We had met soon after I had participated in a project Row Houses. The very first installation work I created there was rather kitsch. I was curious about different vantage points and who was granted the privilege to examine a cultural space from both inside and outside. I believed that Imagination had to cross borders. The experience of being in the African American community, teaching miniature painting classes and locating a common ground mobilized me to create a series of new paintings, including the Armorial Bearing series 1-4 and Uprooted Order series 1-3.
I was struggling with the complexities of lack of representations and misrepresentations dilemma as I grappled with political and artistic self-determination as a young artist. Decontextualized information, especially simplistic understanding about Muslims as if there was no other truth but that enshrined by the clash of civilizations, was frustrating as if one came from a cultural space cut off from the West. Many Americans don’t travel outside of the US and definitely, many more don’t visit Muslim countries. Muslim cultures contain a vast diversity of socio-political, cultural, linguistic, philosophical life, but being in America, one was often left to respond to narrow definitions as the ‘other.’ One such charged, complex and conflicting iconography was the notion of the veil.
Deeply entrenched in the West’s imagination since orientalism, the topic was unavoidable; America’s obsession with the liberation of the Muslim woman as seen in the propaganda for its proxy war in Af-Pak seemingly Muslim by association especially when I wore my Pakistani shalwar kameez, the probing notion often pointed towards me in the US cultural space of the early 1990s, I wanted to respond, to raise questions from a variety of histories and representations. Through exploring the writings of Fatima Mernissi, Edward Said and Fanon the paradox of the veil took on a deeply poignant platform. In my work, the idea is not about the object but about unraveling the anxiety it fosters in West’s imagination as a lurking un-American or anti-American marker within the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. It was in the US that I became aware of the long history in the politics of the West, especially Europe, and its colonial legacy of the politicization of the veil and its function as a battleground for different ideologies at times of crisis. Staged unveiling in French Algeria for example. Women choosing not to wear it as per their own will or choosing to wear it as in the 1970s in Egypt as a sign of rejection of Western consumerism to mandatory veiling and public banning in certain countries. The vested power, contradictory over time, in the shifting meaning of the form in its public debate prompted me to question who is veiled anyways?
I am not sure if people had any tools that help perceive work that borders on any notional embedding in Islam. Art History is 100% premised on a Judeo-Christian armature and works are domiciliated in secular (i.e. Judeo-Christian) spaces. You were making a crack on two fronts, for the USA and for Pakistan. Did you have a feeling as to where you felt your work would best belong to in terms of legibility and reverberations? One finds it difficult to avoid a double bind. How do you see it? How did you get to protect the specificity of your work? An exhilarating aspect of your work was for me the ease and comfort with which you moved in and out of pictorial traditions It was certainly not gawky.
Art-making, for me, was an ongoing movement. I did not stop to think about legibility politics in the art world, perhaps I should have! I believed that I had to make what was urgent for me and pushed the experiment forward. The hardest aspect was that no matter how nuanced one’s work was, the persistently polarized discourse and the prevalent framing devices would inevitably dwarf complexity. This continuing Samuel Huntington style commentary of West versus the rest of the world was present even within the feminist discourse, where one would be expected to cull out one’s representations in the composite ‘third world.’ The notion of the Other was problematic as it gave overt attention to identity over everything else. This was also a time of post Magiciens de la Terre de-centering-the-euro-centric-art-world commentary. Though it stands in stark contrast to where the global aspect of literature and art are now, mid-1990s in the US did not have much diversity. In those days, the prevalent framing devices were so outside of what one was exploring. It has taken almost 25 years for us even to have this conversation!
I clearly recall being asked by Michael Young, on the very first day of class in 1993 at RISD, “Are you here to make East meet West? No one else was asked such a question. Or being utterly disappointed in another class “Mapping Identity in multicultural American art’ to find not a single mention of a South Asian artist. The pendulum swung between stereotypes and invisibility. One became aware very quickly that America was fundamentally about a Black and White relationship where being brown was not yet fully visible.
Yet, cultural hybridity had an incredible cachet during those days even if the discourse was on a UK-India axis.
This struggle with definitions was indeed one’s experience of that period. One was trying to define oneself, and the language of Art History wasn’t really there. It was emerging, and that is why our meeting seemed fortuitous in that particular moment in time. I was reading journals like Third Text; the random copies one came across by digging in libraries; it was not what one would encounter in the curriculum at RISD. I was reading Trinh T. Minh-ha, Arjun Appadurai. Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture had come out that year, but the dense language eluded me, though the idea of a possible third space was inspiring. I was keen to mark the autonomy within miniature painting, not homogenize difference in the process, or get swallowed in the biography and the politics of nationalism.
It was not easy, given that that Euro-American canon dominated the field of painting. Contemporary art from South Asia was still not visible in exhibitions or in gallery representations in early 1990s.
But I also recall exhibitions like “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s” “Hybrid State” at Exit Art, 1993 Whitney Biennial, Documenta X, “Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions” led by the Asia Society in 1996. The “center” had been expanding from within and from the outside. I think at an institutional level, with people like Jane Farver at the Queens Museum, Vishakha Desai at the Asia Society, signs of change were there.
Things opened up more too after the “Out of India” exhibit at the Queens museum in 1997. My iconography started to breach national boundaries. I wanted to intersect with Pakistani feminists writers, poets, like Fahmida Riaz, Ismat Chughtai, Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, with Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and bell hooks [Gloria Jean Watkins] to understand my own engagement with feminist forms and in turn explore language from specific points and places of women narratives. I was dislocating context and intimacy across race and sexuality to re-read the texts from new perspectives that I was experiencing. By reorganizing framing devices of center and margin within the miniature painting, I could open up the narratives of gender and sexuality simultaneously. The female forms that started to emerge in my work were monstrous, playful, explicit, evocative, precise, and determined. It was exciting to see simple means like Ink and brush perform mythic forms. Embodying the displacement was perversely generative and it gave birth to work such as Ready to Leave, Fleshy Weapons, Beyond Surfaces, Riding the Ridden. Hoods Red Rider, Now and Then, Rapunzel dialogues Cinderella, Venus’s Wonderland, Monsters Within.
The Core program also gave a platform to expand ones work outside the studio. There were opportunities to meet a variety of national and international voices like yourself and to partner with local artists and institutions. I was lucky to have a childhood friend of my father’s and his family living in Houston which offered familial support. I was also able to teach at the Glassell. The core program directed by Joe Havel. He was thoughtful and challenging and I always felt he and Alison de Lima Greene had my back. They were both incredibly generous and engaged with what I was doing. I had randomly entered a work in 1995 into a citywide Houston art competition and ended up meeting Dana Friiz Hansen who was on the jury. He was an early champion of my work as well. He introduced it into international group exhibitions, also to Hosfelt gallery and I ended up exploring large scale murals first in at Yerba Buena with Margaret Kilgallen in San Francisco and also with Barry Mcgee in St Louis.
One of my closest friends at RISD was the late African American artist, Donna Bruton. With her I had traveled to Texas in 1994 to the College Art Association conference and with her guidance I was keen to apply for a teaching position at The University of Texas at Austin. During that visit to San Antonio I met the late painter Kanishka Raja which was my first encounter with a South Asian artist, my age and like myself who was straddling being South Asian and American. In Houston I continued to meet many artists of color, including Fred Wilson, Carrie Mae Weems, Whitfield Lovell, Mel Chin, Lilian Garcia Roig, Burt Samples, Anjali Gupta, David Mcgee, David Chung, Otabenga Jones & Associates. The Argentinian artist Nicola Costantino whom I met at the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art was my room-mate in those two years in Houston. One’s sense of community was being determined and though Houston had a small south Asian population I also made efforts to engage with other local Indians and Pakistanis, some students some aspiring writers, who I had met there and started bringing them to the Row Houses in the third ward for spontaneous gatherings. In that respect I was aware of my role as a bridge between communities of color that would not otherwise interact. Soon there was a group formed that would meet weekly for discussion with the African American Marxist philosophy teacher Arthur Shaw, one of Rick Lowe’s mentors. I recall spirited discussions over the course of a year from Aristotle’s’ ethics, Class struggles to John Dewey’s philosophy of education. I also met the African American mathematician Bob Powell with whom I bonded over my interest in sacred geometry and continued to work with him over 2-3 years while I was in Houston. The shift in one’s work started to happen through such unorganized forms of agency, informal discussions, participation, sharing of ideas and feeling heard, nurtured. Spoken word, storytelling, jazz, literature, poetry, shared territories of struggle offered new political spaces.
Overlapping Diasporas…
This was also the time when the Million Man march and Nation of Islam was making headlines so one was made aware about locating the relationship between blackness and Islam. The internationalism of the black political culture was also a facet of American culture familiar to me in Pakistan in the admiration for vocal activists like Muhammad Ali and Malcom X for their critique of white power structures. I was curious to understand the intersections of diverse communities, the transnational nature of Black American Islam because I had spent time in Somalia in the early 1980s when my father took a job there.
Eye-i-ing Those Armorial Bearings was inspired by the dynamic of the Project Row Houses which appear as an armorial seal within the painting. By countering both derogatory representations of blackness in the medieval west as well the politicized representations of the veil in modern times, I attempted reclaiming such associations via positive yet witty representations through the reimagining of entrenched and contested historical symbols.
How was your relationship to Pakistan during that time? Did you visit home or were you invited to make exhibitions there? It seems to me that Houston provided more of a formative community than New York.
In 1996 I went to visit New York with Nicola Costantino. Mary Anne Staniszewski had made an introduction with Jeanette Ingberman and I took Nicola there with me. She showed images of her work and Jeanette put her into an upcoming exhibition. I visited the Drawing Center and I recall meeting Annie Philbin then and spreading all the drawings out of my portfolio onto the floor. When both Nicola and myself returned to Houston, we were in awe at how incredibly open New York was. My work got selected for the Drawing Center’s Spring 1997 group show and a few months later after Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri saw my work at the PRH in Houston, they selected it for their 1997 Whitney Biennial. Both Drawing Center and the biennial overlapped and I had two simultaneous venues to showcase different directions in my work, from miniatures to wall drawings. This is also when you had introduced my work to Jeffrey Deitch and Brent Sikkema. I ended up showing with Deitch projects in 1998 and I recall you and your family were moving back to Istanbul around then. I had shows at the Renaissance Society, Whitney (Philip Morris branch) and Hirshhorn within a span of 1-2 year, 1998-2000.
When I came back to New York from that short Houston visit, I called Brent and Jeffrey but also Lisa Phillips. I remember having a conversation with Susanne Ghez about your work, she had an uncanny sense of embracing great young artists. And Pakistan?
Between 1997-2005, I introduced Pakistanis and South Asians to many curators and museums I was exhibiting. The focus coming at me from Pakistan was to help get others to access institutions, and I was opening doors. No one was inviting me to come to show in Pakistan then. However, by 2002, I was told by the Pakistani art world gatekeepers to return or else I would not be included in the Pakistani canon. It was conflicting to have such pressure. At that time I had a life in the US, personal and professional. I also did not have my paperwork sorted out. I knew that in my household in Lahore I would not be able to make art or have the emotional and physical space I needed, and I also felt it was unfair to be forced to choose or to be punished for being a free spirit. Since then, I have been excluded from group shows organized by Pakistan/UK collaborations, my chronology excluded in books about contemporary neo-miniature coming out of Pakistan, called anti-Pakistani, and there have been plenty of character assassinations. Such outright expunging and simultaneous lashing out would never happen to a Pakistani male artist, no matter what. Ironically transnational reality bellies much loss under the illusion of generative multiplicity.
History is long, this violence you have been subjected to will dissolve eventually. I call it expanded provincialism. That you were not able to travel outside the US must have limited your participation in many projects and hammered you in there.
The lack of mobility in my situation defined the first decade of being in the US during which I was unable to travel outside, creating rifts with friends, family and peers. I was also unable to participate in many shows I was invited or create site specific installations as I may have wanted to, given my work then was exploring large scale murals.
The work then started to embrace the state of homelessness, not as an exiled or diaspora artist but as a female agency through the abodes of patriarchy, militarism across national boundaries, cultures and histories. Anarchy, lack of sovereignty, constructs of femininity, beauty and domesticity started to take center stage.
Meanwhile in the US, there was another dynamic emerging. Within 3-4 years of being in the US, I found my work being seen through the lens of Asian-American and South Asian category and not just Pakistani. South Asian diaspora offered me specifically a new space of subjectivity to triangulate the domestic landscape of Black-White relations in particular (Reinventing the Dislocation series). The South Asian community especially in NYC was engaged and varied and my proximity to it opened up new definition of racial and political space. Yet the heterogeneity of the term South Asian also belied its restrictive nature. Neither the US narrative of immigration as emancipation made sense nor projecting intimacy with India. As a Pakistani national, one was unable to travel to India, never easily, even when applying for visas. Inability to create a sense of connection in person, to have a visceral tactile experience of the culture and shared histories in the subcontinent made the idea even more remote.
Let’s come back to your involvement with miniature painting. I had always thought of montage as a sketchy modernist deployment, a modern form authenticized by “local contenting” activity. My beef with the “heritage extraction” that heritage was not allowed to speak and the potentially rewarding tension within such an anachronism was invariably suppressed by the modern subject. I did not agree with that approach to the traditional. In fact, it presupposed the superiority of the modern subject as it entered a field that it had institutionalized, categorized and silenced. The modern subject shopped for different iterations of the past at will as if choosing from an inventory of styles. That is why your work was profoundly moving for me. For the first time ever there was a young artist who saw tradition eye to eye and engaged with it with a kind of urgency. In Turkey too, miniature painting and calligraphy was departmentalized at the School of Fine Arts to exist not so much as a living thing but as a ready-made traditional output arrested in time and bordering on the artisanal. Hypersecularism (or Judeo-Christianism) suppressed a casual and non-anxious relationship with the past.
So true. When I encountered miniature painting in the early mid 80’s it was from a mis-understanding of high and low art. Everything around me was dictating that tradition was bad and inferior and artist had to be modern to be avant garde. My interest in miniature painting was equally sparked by my own lack of knowledge about the miniature painting tradition. It was mostly mired in its prevalent iterations of “tourist kitsch” much more than its “indigenous” status. We did not grow up with museums. Much of the art was stolen by the English anyways. It was also clear to me that the “tradition” was truncated, at best, and its custodian, the master miniature painter, Bashir Ahmad was struggling to find A+ students to work with. However Bashir Ahmad’s devotion and sincerity to “tradition” was interesting to me as a young observer. Both his teachers—Sheikh Shujaullah and Haji Sharif—belonged to a family of court painters and there was something deeply powerful about that idea of knowledge being passed through generations.
In 1985 I had joined the Kinnaird College for women to study mathematics, economics and literature but quickly got disillusioned from instead its prevalent “waiting for marriage” culture. At that time, I started hearing about the National College of Arts and there was much debate about its reputation. As a liberal co-ed institution, it was an anomaly in the stifling mid 1980’s culture. I arrived at the National College of Arts in 1986–87 in search of a creative environment to reflect upon the mechanism of power and the potential for individual freedom.
What I also encountered at NCA was a split regarding who and what could be the “modern miniaturist.” Bashir Ahmad’s work was mostly copying historical miniature paintings with some changes; on the other side was the work of painter Zahoor ul Ikhlaq, who was engaging the language of historical miniatures through the canon of western painting. In the mid ’1980s, there was no such thing as a viable “contemporary miniature painting”. I was burdened in an inspiring way to create something fresh, something that neither Bashir Ahmed nor Zahoor-ul-ikhlaq had done with their experiments with miniature painting. The desire to depart into a new territory was fueled by an imaginary conversation with several schools of the historical, like Safavid, Mughal, Pahari, Persian, Deccani. One could enter this space, like Alice in Wonderland or go down the ‘River of Fire’ via Qurratulain Hyder. The epiphany that the space to imagine was endless, exhilarating and equally daunting. Thus was born a beautiful wrestle with freedom and confinement. I had so many ideas, but not enough time to make hundreds of paintings, so I thought why not create one epic painting as my epic poem, which resulted in “The Scroll.” There was also a certain playfulness in choosing the format of a scroll as it naturally lends itself to depict a narrative about time, an unfolding of an event, a story, a day, a lifetime, from left to right or right to left, depending on however the viewer wants to enter the space
This is also a time when art history curriculum at NCA was dated. I recall learning by heart sections from Art through the Ages and never fully grasping whatever I was learning as it never directly intersected with one’s lived reality. In terms of miniature painting, its pre-colonial history was written mostly by Westerners from the perspective of Eurocentric Nineteenth-Century scholarship. Without deep critical conversations about English conquest, dispersion and revival of the arts within the academic institution itself, the identity of a Pakistani art was in flux. Such were the huge lacunas in my early development before the internet. The colonial residue, the military’s culture of uncertainty, the dictatorship’s moral ambiguity, along with the feudal hierarchy in Pakistan, felt like a stalemate in those years.
Very soon after I met you, you participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Imagine a woman artist from Pakistan in those days participating in a prestigious exhibition with “Who’s Veiled Anyway?” that is squarely engaging with a pictorial practice at an intimate scale. How do you imagine this work would be received if you showed it at the time in Lahore?
It would have probably been received with curiosity and interest. My Thesis work in 1990-91 in Lahore had laid to rest the debate about miniature’s inability to engage youth. I was teaching in the miniature painting department in 1992 encouraging students on the sidelines weary about prejudices around craft-based work to engage miniature painting with experimentation. 1997 would have been only four years after I left Pakistan. When the work started showing at US and international museums and biennials, it was signaling to the emerging art scene in Lahore that miniature painting was profitable. There was even a greater surge of students coming into the miniature department then. What is important to note here is that I was making the miniatures myself. I did not opt to set up a production house to churn out miniatures to cash in on the demand. I also started to explore other mediums to counter the narrow assumption of miniature as a culturally tied art.
Miniature painting, with its unresolved national status and deep stigma captured the paradox of culture and nationalism far more than any other discipline at NCA in the shifting geopolitical landscape of the 1980s. To have contributed and brought attention to miniature painting as an idiom, as a language within contemporary art practices, internationally in the 1990s at a time when there was no prevalent discussion on its status within contemporary art world remains a big issue of pride for me. Now it is exported as an exclusive Pakistani nationalistic art which also is problematic as the practice is not exclusive to Pakistan. The marginalization aside, I feel it is imperative to question gatekeeping cultures that traffic overtly nationalistic definition of contemporary art based on notions of cultural authenticity.
How tradition is defined and how it is disseminated remains a charged area. Tradition was often recognized in how the immigrant or the other was perceived. There was an excitement for me in terms of being connected to a tradition. This was starkly different from being seen as a ‘traditional’ artist. What was lost on others especially in those years when contemporary miniature painting had not yet become an export of Pakistani artistic identity was that it offered a space to dissect, question and examine the euro-centric rhetoric about the genre. I became interested in how the narratives and definition were constructed and examining the provenance of the manuscripts residing in the various storages of western museums allowed me to build a relationship with the truncated history of miniature painting. To develop a reciprocity with the past, even if it meant to dig into the colonial histories of dispersion, I learned that tradition is not static and I could inhabit it with the curiosity of a novice and emerge with transmuted power. It continues to fuel my spirit and imagination.
The term Islamic art itself has evolved into a slippery protagonist, just like the mythical beast of burden, it is illusive and yet omnipresent in art history and in its kinship to the broader lack of imagination regarding Islam in current state of the world. So then, yes, the stakes are higher, especially for artist that are searching through the rubric of politicized muslim histories, whose works don’t fit in any dominant narratives and whose searching is fundamental to counter the narrow definitions and intellectual crisis as well as emergence of terror as a defining political aesthetic force on the global stage.
Thank you Shahzia, you have pioneered such a novel course. I cannot tell you how compelling it has been for my thinking in engaging with the traditions. Your work’s indifference to the ingrained, inherent superiority of those who utilize miniature painting and improve it as it were (a modernist impulse) has been profoundly inspirational.
vasıf kortun 