Parallax

source: guggenheim-bilbaoes

The Film & Video room is a space permanently dedicated to video art and moving images.

Shahzia Sikander (1969, Lahore) takes traditional Indo-Persian drawing as her point of departure to form a critique of contemporary history. Shahzia’s work is pioneer in transferring the miniature technique to contemporary art and she is responsible for its resurgence in this domain.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents her work Parallax (2013); a multichannel installation composed of hundreds of digitally animated images. As her starting point, the artist focuses on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz. Concepts such as the ideas of conflict and control emerge as the core themes of a perspective stretching from modern history to the post-colonial period. The animation simultaneously combines abstract, figurative and textual elements, emphasizing the narrative complexity of the work. The soundtrack includes six poems recited in Arabic and written specifically for the video on subjects ranging from the regional historic context to reflections on human nature.
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source: pilarcorrias

Internationally recognised, Pakistani born American artist, Shahzia Sikander is best known for her experimentation with the formal constructs of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a variety of formats and mediums, including video, animation, mural and collaboration with other artists.

Over the years, she has pioneered an interpretive and critically charged approach to the anachronistic genre of miniature painting. Underpinning the work is also Sikander’s interest in paradox, societies in flux, and formal and visual disruption as a means to cultivate new associations.

For her second solo show at the gallery Shahzia Sikander is presenting a new 3-channel animation work, which will also preview at the Sharjah Biennial in March 2013. Accompanying the animation are 4 large scale drawings and 4 smaller works on paper.

Focusing on the Strait of Hormuz and the area’s historical power tensions, the animation Parallax is inspired by the idea of conflict and control. Drawn elements come together to create dissonance and disruption. Abstract, representational and textual forms coexist and jostle for domination. Spheres made of hair spin and sing, Christmas trees made of valves and spools spout, while undulating colour fields create pitch and fervour and large swaths of static noise erupt into flocks. Human voices recite and narrate, creating tension and rhythm while oscillating between audible texts and the environmental sounds. Visual vocabulary is culled from drawings and paintings to construct the animation, giving the motifs and symbols a shifting identity as they come together to re-create meaning within the digital space.

In her current practice, drawing and animation are interlinked and inform each other. Ideas housed on paper are put into motion. Patterns of thinking and movement are worked out via drawing. Moving between these two mediums is a way for her to see and convey multiple sides to a situation. The resulting shift in perspective functions as a vantage point highlighting the distance between two locations namely drawing and animation. Translation thus emerges as a concept. Text embedded in the drawings also functions as a tool to further explore ideas around translation, as in translation’s relationship to a tradition, and tradition with all its inherent redactions.

In the drawings titled ‘Redaction’, ‘Mirage’ and ‘I am the exact imitation of the original’ the play on words implies a certain narrative while the meaning is kept in flux. Is original a construct? What is the distance between the original and its translation and at what point does the translation become an original. The distance thus becomes the interim, the interstice, the pause, the silence, the interval, the separation, the lacuna or the gap between two positions. It is exactly this space that the drawings and the animation tend to explore.

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. She received her B.FA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan and an M.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Major solo exhibitions of Sikander’s work include Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio (2012), Mass Art, Boston (2011) San Francisco Art Institute (2010) Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York (2009) Para/Site, Hong Kong (2009); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); daadgalerie, Berlin (2008); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); Miami Art Museum, Miami (2005); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2004); The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2004); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C (2000), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999) and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1998).

Sikander has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including the inaugural Medal of Art by the US State Department (2012) the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Achievement award (2006-2011); the National Pride of Honor by the Pakistani Government (2005), the Joan Mitchell award (1998-999), and the Tiffany foundation award (1997). In 2006 Sikander was a named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Shahzia Sikander lives and works in New York City.
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source: shahziasikander

Shahzia Sikander received her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Pakistani-born and internationally recognized, Sikander’s pioneering practice takes Indo-Persian miniature painting as a point of departure. She challenges the strict formal tropes of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions by experimenting with scale and media. Such media include animation, video, mural, and collaboration with other artists. Her process-based work is concerned with examining the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories. Her work helped launch a major resurgence in the Miniature Painting department in the Nineties at the National College of Arts in Lahore, inspiring many others to examine the miniature tradition.
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source: nikolajkunsthaldk

Shahzia Sikander was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1969 and was educated at the National College of Arts Lahore in 1991 and at Rhode Island School of Design, USA, in 1995.

Shahzia Sikander’s practice takes as its starting point the Indo-Persian miniature painting, but she challenges and breaks with its normally very strict idiom as far as scale, symbolism, and choice of media are concerned. She employs elements of the miniature painting in animations, video works, installations, and murals.

Her works have given rise to a meteoric international career from the mid- and late 90’s, and her efforts have promoted national as well as international interest in Pakistani miniature artists.

Shahzia Sikander was the first artist from the Miniature Painting Department of the Lahore Art Academy to challenge the technical and aesthetic boundaries of this medium. She was educated under Bashir Ahmed who re-introduced the miniature painting as a major subject at the Academy, and she became the first student also to be a teacher, alongside Bashir Ahmed.