Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice, on view April 20–October 20, 2024. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Collective Behavior is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. This is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together nearly 40 pieces made over the past 35 years, including new site-specific drawings and glass works created for the exhibition.
For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Pakistan) has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for our present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums—paintings, drawings, prints, digital animations, mosaics, sculpture, and glass—Sikander considers Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that makes visible marginalized subjects. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States.
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Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice, on view April 20–October 20, 2024. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Collective Behavior is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. This is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together nearly 40 pieces made over the past 35 years, including new site-specific drawings and glass works created for the exhibition.
For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Pakistan) has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for our present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums—paintings, drawings, prints, digital animations, mosaics, sculpture, and glass—Sikander considers Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that makes visible marginalized subjects. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States.
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