Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce the exhibition Stalemate featuring new work by Shahzia Sikander on view from April 3 through May 2, 2009. Culling information from a range of sources, across different cultures and time periods, Shahzia Sikander uses painting and drawing, moving pictures and music, text and imagery, to create artwork that subverts notions of authority and its joust with time.
As she states, “I am interested in recorded histories and their paths of evolution in terms of what gets culled and elaborated. What is usually left out is the space imagination fills in. Drawing upon literature, political and national histories, art history, media and language, and lived experience, I find shifting geographical locations compelling. The indisputable concept of plural identity versus the assertion of a monolithic one, the fear of the other, politicized ideas of patriotism, constantly evolving truths and all the bizarre shifts between reality and perception are but some of the elements that provide paradox, humor, irony and material for me.”
Stalemate will feature a series of drawings and paintings entitled Mapping the End of Something. Invoking imagination and inventiveness, myth and ideology, Sikander constructs an open pictorial space that is rich, engaging, transparent, layered and tactile.
In the two video works also on view, music instruments are played upon as the weapons of choice. Inseparable from the institution of authority, military music is a paradox striving to provide the emotional and creative space while occupying a precarious relationship to music itself.
Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, and currently lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Sikander’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at institutions worldwide including recent solo exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and at the MCA Sydney, Australia.
Shahzia Sikander’s curatorial exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Shahzia Sikander Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection, is currently on view and will run through September 7th. The exhibition includes the new work Provenance, The Invisible Hand.