Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, at CMA

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice, (April 20–October 20, 2024) as a collateral event of the 60th International La Biennale di Venezia. The U.S. iterations are co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum. This is the most comprehensive presentation of the Pakistani American artist’s work to date, bringing together 40 pieces made over 35 years, including new site-specific drawings and glass works created for the exhibition. 

The CMA presents Sikander’s art in relation to South Asian objects that inspired her from the globally renowned South Asian collection. In this context, Collective Behavior places Sikander’s artistic practice in relation to the global history that precedes it, while the Cincinnati Art Museum concurrently offers a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work. Indeed, the U.S. exhibitions demonstrate that Sikander is not only one of the most important artists of our time for the breadth of understanding she has of art history, the history and colonialism and imperialism, global capitalism, and intersectional feminism (just a few subjects she’s beautifully and brilliantly schooled viewers on over her four-decade career), but for range of media she employs and masters in order to communicate complex truths. Collective Behaviorreveals Sikander’s mastery of miniature paintings, large-scale mosaic, and video, and includes her first sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies.

In her germinal 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that marginalized, or “subaltern,” voices are silenced, appropriated, and misrepresented in cultures dominated by white masculine power and global capitalism. Further complicating the “subaltern” voice is the loss of one’s culture of origin, as people living in a “formerly” colonized states often experience a hybridity of cultures under European imperialism and colonialism.

Sikander operates in a creative, intellectual space based, and as a Pakistani American woman, she mines, celebrates, and critiques the cultures and spaces she navigates as immigrant, female, global member of generation X, artist, etc. Earlier in her career, for instance, Sikander took on the hijab and burqa, exploring her relationship to the veil, as it was also referred to in the media after 9/11—asserting through the work and her trenchant voice, that she often felt safe behind the veil. While in public she was not subject to white European beauty standards and—more pointedly, the judgmental gazes and sexual leers of people, particularly men.

Sikander’s artistic training began in Lahore, Pakistan, where she studied historical manuscript painting at the National College of the Arts, where she would also become the first woman to teach in the institution’s miniature painting department, her mastery of the technique and media are the foundation of Collective Behavior. The artist selected works, such as Nur Jahan holding a portrait of Emperor Jahangir, attributed to Bishandas (1627), finding common themes in her own miniature paintings. She juxtaposes her, Uprooted Order I of 1997, with Bishandas’, which depicts Nur Jahan, the favorite spouse of Jahangir, who reigned Mughal India from 1607-27, in front of a stark olive green, looking solemn, yet resolved to handle his affairs; Sikander notes, “the disparity between the physical presence and strength of Nur Jahan, and the diminished stature of Jahangir, who is reduced to an image.” Indeed, her body fills the space, she is in motion.

Sikander’s Uprooted Order I depicts a figure standing atop a lotus blossom, who is held by an earthy being from below, while being subsumed by a ghostly, angelic being from behind, and summoned by transparent hands from above. In keeping with the 17^th century work, the background is olive green, her mastery of the brush tells us with the finest strokes of sinuous white pigment that the figure depicted is not long for this world; he is transitioning, pulled between life and death in his final hours.

The artist uses the same pigments employed in miniature painting in larger-scale works, as with Pleasure Pillars of 2001, which depicts iconic women from a variety of cultural tales, religions, and traditions surrounding a woman with enormous ram horns at the center of the composition. Her body is absent yet nonetheless wrought by the figures surrounding her. Her face is serene, confident, and fearless. The ram with the black and white-striped horns coiling from her skull are a common motif in Sikander’s work, symbolizing wisdom, strength, and resistance. The message of theram horns is such an apt sign of female power—such a threat to social order in the current historical moment, that her large-scale sculpture depicting a figure with the ram head, Witness (2023), was beheaded on July 8, 2024, at the University of Houston. The title now ominous, invites us bear witness to a violent act of beheading of an empowered female image of a renowned artist’s imagination; Sikander chose to leave her headless in Houston. Now, may the memory of the enormous head, writhing in power and ideas, haunt the misogynist vandals critical of female and feminine strength, wisdom, and resistance.

Sikander’s first sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies of 2020, is a centerpiece of the exhibition, and solidifies many themes of her career. Wrought of patinated bronze in a hue evocative of Indian sandstone sculpture and a surface as matte-smooth as polished marble, she depicts a Devata or Celestial Indian Dancer, whose left hip is seductively perched atop the shoulder of the Greco-Roman goddess of love and sensuality, Venus. The Devata is evocative of Female tree deity with attendant, of circa 973 from Northwestern India, a sandstone work installed nearby. The latter figure references Bronzino’s painting, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (circa 1545), her gaze toward the Devata’s, right arm gesturing upward as in the painting, yet seductively catching the beads dangling between the Indian dancer’s breasts.

Promiscuous Intimacies is an overt display of female erotica and queer sexualities, subjects common to feminist discourses today, but completely out-of-context, perhaps forbidden in the historical periods and places from which the Devata and Venus come. Indeed, it is the melding of cultures, pasts, subjective identities of people that Sikander’s oeuvre most often explores, and the union of the two deities of “east” and “west” is a keen instance of this artistic impulse.

Two of the most sublime and simultaneously stunning works in Collective Behavior are large-scale mosaics, another medium Sikander has mastered over her career. The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired Touchstone of 2021 for the permanent collection; its acquisition number: 2025.1, meaning it was the first work of art purchased in the new year, making it a happy one in Cleveland, as the piece, like Sikander’s work, critically and aesthetically melds so many historical references, visual, religious, and literary, into an internationally renowned collection of “eastern” art—a history she studied and now is living and creating herself. Touchstone is in conversation with three Indian paintings from the 1500 and 1600s in the Museum’s collection, each of which represents a powerful woman protagonist assuming agency.

Situated near Uprooted Order I (1997), Touchstone (2021) depicts Radha, a Hindu heroine, who is known as Krishna’s preferred lover. However, Sikander removes Krishna, focusing on Radha, as much as one can, as Radha protects that which is fleeting. The green, gold, red, and earth tones of the glass work are indeed otherworldly. The figure becomes part of the floral and fauna, the stars and “divine” light, Radha “protects that which is fleeting.” An alchemist, Sikander transforms glass and the weight and permanence of mosaic works into light and transience.

A must-see exhibition, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is on view through June 25, 2025 on the first floor of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Work Cited: Didactic texts written by Cleveland Museum of Art staff to accompany the Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior exhibition (accessed March 7-May 22, 2025).