Cycles and Transitions

The painting featured is from Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander. Born and raised in Pakistan, Sikander brings painting traditions from South and Central Asia into dialogue with contemporary practices, interrogating themes of cultural identity, racial narratives, colonial and postcolonial histories, and issues of gender and sexuality. In this painting, Sikander works to conflate female bodies with the landscape. “Female forms, in guises from comical to dark, resist categorization.” In describing her painting, Sikander states: “I was responding to my inability to locate Brown South-Asian representation in the feminist space in 1990s art-history books. The monolithic category ‘third-world feminism’ felt offensive and limiting while it also pointed out white feminism’s blind spots and exclusions.”

Find this painting and many others by Sikander at the Morgan Museum and Library in Manhattan!

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