Shahzia Sikander
For Immediate Release
Darlene Gillan, Director of Communications
tel. 617 879 7050
e. darlene.gillan@massart.edu
Shahzia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions
Exhibition dates: September 19 - November 26, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011:
Visiting Artist Talk: 5:30 pm, Tower Auditorium
Opening Reception: 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, Bakalar Gallery
Musical Performance by Du Yun: 7:00 pm, Bakalar Gallery
Shahzia Sikander works in a time of great geopolitical change. Recent events in the Middle East, for example, have helped to break down clichéd cultural and political boundaries and open up new frameworks for contemporary visual art. Working in painting, drawing, animation, installation, video, and film, and employing ideas that are often subversive and polemical in nature, Sikander creates artworks that are physical manifestations of the momentum of our globalized world.
Born in Pakistan and now based in New York, Sikander studied miniature painting in the late 1980s at the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan. Since then, she has developed an original artistic practice that creates a new dialogue with this historical painting style. Inspired by Indo-Persian schools of miniature painting, Sikander incorporates aesthetic debates of popular iconography and contemporary cultural theory into her work. By referring to the traditional forms of miniatures, she conjures associations with imperialism, as well as storytelling and popular mythology. Yet by unraveling the conventions of miniaturist paintings, she also deconstructs the post-colonial legacy of the Pakistan region. Her work confronts and interrogates the perceptual distances between the cultures designated as "East" and "West," an area of poignancy and difficulty in the current political climate.
Throughout her practice, Sikander interweaves references to the past with reflections on everyday life and its forms, and these visual motifs, drawn from a rich mental archive of imagery, repeat and reinvent themselves across various media. Sikander's primary materials include graphite, ink, and gouache on paper, and in 2001 she began working in digital animation, setting her miniatures into motion. This use of animation, as well as her layered images and the play between representational and abstract forms, de-stabilizes Sikander's representations and visually embodies her central concerns of transformation, societies in flux, and disruption as a means to cultivate new associations.
A number of exciting free public events are planned for October 3, 2011. At 5:30pm, Sikander will speak in the Tower Auditorium about her work and be available to answer questions. The exhibition's opening reception will follow in the Bakalar Gallery with a special live performance by internationally known composer and musician Du Yun, who collaborated with Sikander on a video on view in the exhibition.
The exhibition Shahzia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions was curated by Hou Hanru for the Walter and McBean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Exhibitions at the college are free and open to the public. The galleries are located in South Hall, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston.
For current information, please visit MassArt.edu, email galleryinfo@massart.edu, or call the automated information line at 617-879-7333.
***High Resolution Images Available Upon Request***
Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery
Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday: 12 pm - 6 pm
Wednesday: 12 pm - 8 pm
Free and open to the public. Handicapped accessible.
Address: 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MBTA: Green "E" line.
Information: 617 879 7333 or MassArt.edu
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