Shahzia Sikander’s “The Scroll” (vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on hand-prepared wasli paper, 1989-1990)
The Visual Arts department invites you to a public lecture by Shahzia Sikander, a candidate for the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonization and Transformational Artistic Practice.
Please join us at 7pm Tuesday, July 12, in room 103 of UVic’s Fine Arts building (masks encouraged) or via Zoom: https://uvic.zoom.us/j/96013374661
A pioneering Pakistani American artist, Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known as neo-miniature. By bringing the traditional and historical into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through imperial and feminist perspectives. Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories.
Recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and US Medal of Art, Sikander’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally including at MoMA NY, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, MAXXI Museum Rome, MOT Japan, Asia Society HK, and Jesus College, Cambridge, UK. A traveling survey of her early works opened at the Morgan Library and Museum New York in 2021 and traveled to the RISD Museum and closed in June 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
If awarded, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonization and Transformational Artistic Practice will establish locally and globally impactful innovations through interconnecting artistic, Indigenous, and global perspectives across a program of transdisciplinary research and creative work.