Shahzia Sikander: High Seas; Closed Skies

Introduction

Victoria Miro is delighted to present High Seas; Closed Skies, the gallery’s first exhibition by Shahzia Sikander since announcing representation of the New York-based artist.

A focal point of High Seas; Closed Skies is Shahzia Sikander’s acclaimed new animation, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. The work is a radiant cinematic tableau that navigates the enduring currents of power and trade that have shaped the global landscape from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era.

Animated from hand-painted images, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles traces the entangled histories linking the British East India Company, Mughal India and Qing China through objects and symbols that signal how authority was constructed, distributed and contested. The work interrogates Britain’s opium cultivation in India, its coercive trade with China and the First Opium War, exposing the mechanisms of imperial extraction and the deep power asymmetries between Britain and China at the time. Its title refers to the incremental expansion of territorial waters: the legal zone between three and twelve nautical miles from any coastline where sovereignty can be asserted, contested and enforced.

Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel and presented by UBS, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles received its debut this spring in Hong Kong (where it is on view until 21 June), transforming the exterior of M+ into an immersive screen within the cityscape, and in doing so aligning subject with setting, past with present. The work now comes to London, the city in which the East India Company was chartered, where decisions that turned Bengal into an opium production system were ratified, and through which Hong Kong was seized as a colonial outpost. Here, the work will be heard for the first time with its score, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. The exhibition also features new mosaics and works on paper.

Works

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Shahzia Sikander

Few artists have so fundamentally transformed the form they were trained in as Shahzia Sikander, who took the centuries-old discipline of Central and South Asian manuscript painting and made it entirely, irreversibly new.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1969, Sikander trained at the National College of Arts, where she earned a BFA in 1991. Her breakthrough thesis work, The Scroll, 1989–90, received national critical acclaim. The work brought about a consideration of the Central and South Asian manuscript painting tradition on entirely new terms; what Sikander achieved would eventually launch the form known today as ‘neo-miniature’. Following this early success, Sikander was appointed to teach miniature painting at NCA in 1992 alongside her own master, Bashir Ahmed, becoming the first woman, and the first of his students, ever to do so. She left for the United States shortly after, receiving an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, and has been based in New York City ever since.

Sikander’s practice over the past three decades has been a sustained act of expansion across painting, video animation, mosaic and sculpture. Iconoclastic in nature, her work moves through gender, sexuality, racial narratives and colonial histories, engaging ideas of language, trade, empire and migration through fluid and surreal permutations. It is postmodern in its appetite, feminist in its convictions, and has been pivotal in establishing art of the South Asian diaspora as a strand of the contemporary American tradition, while simultaneously achieving global significance, garnering widespread critical acclaim and achieving prominence worldwide.

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