AN INTERVIEW WITH SHAHZIA SIKANDER: The Complete Transcript

Heber: Earlier you mentioned that your parents were very supportive when you decided that you wanted to pursue a career as an artist. Did that mean that your parents were more liberal than the average Muslim parents? I would assume that, being a woman in a Muslim country, it's not a great advantage.

It overlaps into other cultures also because I think their biggest concern would be how would you make a career out of a field like art. Also, in my parent's generation they haven't seen, perhaps, many people who have made successful careers out of art. So I think that it's one of the biggest concerns. It wasn't because of me being a woman, or me being a woman and pursuing art. I think those aspects in my family were not an issue at all, because there's always been a lot of encouragement for women to study. And a lot of family members older to [than] me, like my aunts and all, like everybody, had a career, whether they were lawyers or academics or writers or scholars. So that type of support was normal and even grandparents always encouraged education. The main issue always was financial. And my parents were very clear that if you were able to get a scholarship or some means of financial support—especially when I was thinking about leaving the country to go and pursue a graduate degree—that was the only concern. Which made a lot of sense for me, because I absolutely did not want to have a burden on them. Especially, you know, studying art.

Navid: Why did you move to Texas after Rhode Island?

I went to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) for school so, you know, after that I was applying for situations which would help me stay in the country, primarily. You graduate and you think you will get a teaching job. There are very few teaching jobs out there, and usually people that are competing for those teaching jobs are the faculty or other artists. So you have to have some teaching experience. And out of school, you don't have any teaching experience, so there's this catch-22 that happens. So on realizing that, I also started to apply for residencies. For artists there are lots of residency programs around the U.S., where you can basically go for a few weeks to a few months and they give you a stipend and a place to stay and a means to make work. So that was the only other thing at that time that made sense. So what took me to Texas was a residency at the Core Program, which was at the Glassell School of Art. And it's in affiliation with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. It was for a year and it was extendable for another year. So I was there for two years. There are very few residencies that are for longer periods of time like that. But I think I went to Houston by getting feedback that it was a good place to go to and a very inexpensive city. So a lot of people move to New York after they finished school—and so did I, for a few months, and realized that it was terribly expensive and miserable living. Because you really kind of never were able to make work. And whatever time you had was spent juggling jobs. And you felt you were supposedly at the right place, but I felt I was very depressed because I was unable to make anything, and never had the money to make it, or the space to make it. So the residency seemed a very appropriate thing. In fact it was very beneficial because it sort of was an extension of the graduate program, for me, because I was able to make a lot of work when I went to Texas for two years.

Blanca: Did you ever think you would get this far as an artist?

What do you mean?

Blanca: Like when you were just telling us how you went through a depression because you just didn't know what was going to happen after school, after graduate school—if you were going to be able to make a living, if you were going to support yourself throughout your artwork? And here you are, we're interviewing you because you obviously are a successful artist. Did you ever imagine you would become this successful?

No. You know, I don't think one thinks like that. It's just that a lot of things happen, and as they're happening, they're very exciting. But it's also important to understand, I think, in my experience, that aspects, I don't know how to say it... but aspects of the art world are very fickle. I think that for artists, it's not very clear how everything will unfold. Your work, perhaps, once it's out in public, obviously you can't control it. So at times people respond to it differently. At times, it's not in fashion. Whatever happens, there are so many other factors outside that play a part. Like for me it never is that I have achieved something. For me, I always feel that I'm not sure what's going to happen next year, or what's going to happen the year after or what's in the future. So I really kind of just focus on the project at hand and try to do the best that I can. And that, for me, is as much as I can control. Because I have seen there are many artists who are very, very talented and brilliant, who don't necessarily get the recognition or who [aren’t] necessarily able to support themselves through their work. It's unlike other professions, which with age or with more experience there's more strengthening. It's a very different system and that, I think, fundamentally makes me feel that I can't control it. So what I can control is the work that I make. And as far as that is concerned, I try to develop it as fully as I can before I put it out in public.

Pauli: About the people who view your artwork, who do you think your target audience is, and who do you want your target audience to be?

I think that's a great question because one of the reasons why I moved from Texas to New York was also to kind of find if there was a[n] audience out there for the work. I did not feel a good reception for what I was doing when I was in Texas. But I think it's also because it was only right after graduate school, and as an artist, as a person, I think I've evolved more since then. But New York was obviously much more diverse, and multiple aesthetics can exist... do exist here. As well as so much participation from a lot of people from all over, all different disciplines. So that was very encouraging to kind of explore. And, with that, what happened was that I did engage with a young South Asian community of artists, writers, performance artists, musicians, deejays, when I first got here. I very actively got involved with different organizations, and also with different people. And found that there was a lot of response from them. And for myself, also, a sense of finding kind of a moment where I felt like it made sense for me to remain in the U.S. and keep delaying my return to Pakistan. Because simultaneously there was pressure I always felt—from people, from faculty, from other artists operating in Pakistan—to return. To make work there, to participate there. That pressure has always existed for a lot of artists who go abroad, or who go outside, and that type of phenomena was something that I think for a long time, I was trying to struggle with. And so that made it even more important for me to find out who the audience would be. But the audience, obviously, has expanded by [my] spending more time and making more work and having more opportunity to show work in different places. I didn't start my work, set in mind, that this is an audience that I have to target. For me, what was important was to make work which would be compelling enough for people to respond to and that would be just the first premise of some type of a communication. Unless I'm doing a very specific project that has a particular audience in mind.

Zara: Do you choose which works of art to show, based on the location that they're being displayed?

Yeah, I think location, context, matters a lot. Context primarily. Because location obviously in my situation, it's the space in which the work is going to be exhibited. And since some of the work that I do is created onsite, it requires a different type of space, versus the smaller drawings or more object-oriented work. So the context becomes important. For example, I'm doing a project for a hospital in London right now. And the hospital is in East London. And the sort of immigrant communities in parts of East London are Somali and Bangladeshi communities, as well as other communities also. But this particular hospital is for breast care, so they invited a lot of British artists and myself to make work which will be permanently installed over there. So one had to go and meet with the breast care nurses, with the patients, with community centers that deal with the patients and to sort of like have an understanding of the space, of the patients and their needs, as well as the location, and the sort of overarching theme is landscape. So, obviously, keeping that in mind and then to make work in relationship to all of that. So then it becomes very specific.

James: Do you feel like you've ever had to censor your artwork?

I'm not sure if censor is the appropriate term, but I do think that at times I have to be really careful as well as conscious of how the work can be understood or misunderstood. If I'm working with information or with images which may read in [a] dual way, where perhaps the purpose is to negate the stereotype. To use it in the work but to turn it around or to express a different meaning or to use humor. Sometimes people will only see things the way they always want to see them. And that type of complexity leads to a lot of situations where the intention is one thing but the way the work then exists is different. So there are times when you feel that perhaps editing it further may be beneficial.

Navid: Who is your favorite artist?

Oh... that's a very, very difficult question. I think for me it's very important that the people who I respond to, their work, usually happens when I know them…when I've had opportunity to understand their work, see their work in many different exhibitions, or understand their processes. It becomes a really personal, tangible, meaningful exchange no matter what the aesthetic may be or even if it's totally separate from what I'm doing. Similar to how you're asking all these questions and the more I respond the better understanding perhaps we both will have. So that became very essential. The more I met artists, the more I saw their work and better understood the depth of their work. Those artists' work stays with me. So it's usually dependent on who I happen to meet and who was interested in the work or who initiated a dialogue. Perhaps by moving to New York I got more opportunit[ies] to meet other artists—to not meet them superficially but to meet them at many other levels and to actually go and see the exhibitions and talk to them. So when I think "Oh, who's my favorite artist?" It's usually the people whose work I understand better. I like Matthew Ritchie's work. I like Julie Mehretu’s. But I really like Gabriel Orozco’s work also. I don't know the artist personally, but I know the work; I've seen a lot of exhibitions.

Navid: Your painting shows a lot of symbols that repeat themselves in other paintings of yours. So is there any special meaning or... are you trying to send any messages to your audience?

Yeah, I like the idea of exhausting an image. And to generate as many combinations as I can through the usage of limited vocabulary. Because every time it becomes familiar to a viewer they attach a meaning to it and next time they may see it used in another context. So it's something that I became interested in by a process of, say, editing down information so there's less information and different ways of utilizing that information, so that the viewer is not necessarily aware of where this work or that language is coming from but [he or she] is actually able to make some kind of sense with the given information. So that's sort of embedded in the sort of device of using images again and again. And not necessarily just repeating them in the same way, but through repetition create different formations.

Heber: Can I ask the next question? Miniature painting... it's a type of art that has been done in your country, or in that region, for a really long time. But then you came along and then you kind of added this like modern touch to it. How did people in your country react when they saw that? Were there other people who were doing the same thing at the same time?

Yes. I think it wasn't as black and white as that I started adding a kind of a modernist take on it or “reinventing” it, perhaps—which I think is, again, a very strong word. There were people who had been making miniature paintings and there's a tradition of people making miniatures which are closer to the older themes, but by and large even the work that I have seen of artists before me was thematic. It was not from a personal space. And my interest really was to bring the personal into this space. I think there is this whole phenomenon of people making miniatures and there is definitely a lot that I kind of facilitated. As I was mentioning before, it's mushroomed all over in Pakistan, everybody is making miniature painting. It is also problematic because this is happening without critically analyzing how it's being consumed. And then everybody kind of thinks that, “oh, they make miniatures they will get famous”... or if they make miniatures they will get rich, or that's the way of getting into graduate school. So that type of thing happening often creates work by artists which is not necessarily thought through in terms of what they are doing with the tradition or how they are engaging with the tradition. I kind of felt the complexity of this entire situation when I went to Pakistan the last couple of times. I think I feel a lot of responsibility and a sense of participation with all of this because at that time when I was doing this, twelve years ago at the National College of Arts, there was nobody interested even in looking at it.

Blanca: What was the response of the audience [to] the piece that you made, Who’s Veiled Anyway?, in which you portrayed a man wearing a veil instead of the traditional woman wearing the veil. What response did the public [give] and what response were you expecting?

I think that piece in particular, and maybe a couple of more works at that time, were done because of the frustration that I was experiencing in how people were very easily interested in categorizing me or my work under the label of “Muslim” or “Islamic” or “woman” in a very simplistic way. So I was more interested in challenging the simplistic ways of describing somebody. So that was what I was challenging which is: who's veiled anyways? Why people's understanding is so limited. Like, Who's Veiled Anyway? is people who have less information about other cultures and yet, through limited information, they can be biased or judgmental. And that is the duality of that title. And so what I did in that particular painting was take the image from the Persian painting and then put a kind of a torn white line over it, and not really change it much at all. And then implicit in it was the sort of loaded notion, oh, this must be the woman or this must be the veiled woman. That stereotype is problematic, but people just readily read that just because I happen to be coming from Pakistan. So I was trying to grapple with the complexity of that experience. Now, with distance, I also realize that playing with such loaded images also is very, very problematic because once that image is there in the painting people may not necessarily want to understand what you're doing with that image but they just want to see, “Oh, it's an image... which looks like a veil.” "Yes, but she only paints veils.” Or, “her work only has to do with veils." It's like the immediate conclusion that comes along by looking at something and then making an opinion or passing judgment. So that has become a very important experience for me to have gone through—to realize the complexities of a situation like that. Well, what to do? Should you steer clear from it or should you respond to something you feel... affected enough by to respond to? At that time, in '93, '94, I was affected by such inquisitions all the time. People wanted to know who I was, what I wore, how I presented myself, and where I came from, and naturally assumed a lot of the other things. So, this whole issue on identity always became an important thing. But along came simplistic understandings. Oh, “Muslim woman”, “Pakistani artist”, deals with maybe “liberation”... “oppression of women”. So simplistic readings like that, once they exist out in the press or they have existed, I feel that they are the most detrimental thing. So, that has been a very interesting and complex, frustrating at times, and a situation which is very charged. And then, obviously I feed off of such feedback. Because I will then create work which will be in response to the situation.

Heber: For those who have been inspired by your work and would like to follow your footsteps, what kind of recommendations would you give for them?

I think it's one step at a time. I think you should try to take some studio classes and try to see how you respond to it. If you really enjoy it, there's so much more, you can try it out at many levels. And then come to an understanding that, okay, this is really something that is making sense and I want to pursue it. And I think for me, what is most significant was that it was an outlet of expression. I was very, very quiet. I was always a loner, hardly spoke, and I was quite a nerd in school. So I was an outsider always. And I also would make a lot of portraits of people. It was a means of winning somebody's affection, or giving somebody a present. And also earlier, I used to do all my cousins' and siblings' homework... all their art homework. I would be responsible for that. It was a very conscious decision on my part to pursue it. And when I kind of took it on, it was about applying myself fully. So it was not about thinking that, oh, this is fun and I'm going to pursue it because I enjoy it. It was consciously that I'm taking the responsibility, so I will have to do it. So timing is very important. And I think you should try out different things and take as many classes you like. And then what naturally—the direction you will progress into—embrace it. But it's okay to change [your] mind and, you know, you don't necessarily have to totally focus on one thing.

Zara: Have you ever showed a specific piece of work in the United States, but it hasn't really gotten a reaction? And you've showed the same work in Pakistan, and it has a more controversial reaction?

Um, I think the reaction in general to the work has shifted from place to place. I can't think of an example of a work, but I think that… works that maybe dealt a lot with perhaps stereotypes have been received differently. Like in Pakistan, people would respond to something that had the look of being exotic—they would respond differently to that. Versus people here. I did some work after September 11th that kind of was not necessarily critical of the U.S., but was critical of media and what happens in the press, how information is spun around. And what type of situation is created. So there was work that reflected that. So, that type of work, obviously, became a little bit more particular and political in nature. So, that work may be seen differently in different situations, because I am responding mostly to [a] situation that I reside in, that I am a participant of. Obviously that context will change when a viewer who is unfamiliar to that responds to the work. So that shift happens. I think a lot of my work in the mid-nineties dealt with identity because I became a spectacle. So it wasn't just the work—it was who I was that also came into focus. Like if I had continued to make work in Pakistan, I don't think it would have been that affected by issues of identity. So obviously, you know, the environment plays a part in how I respond to it, as well as how it's received.

Pauli: What type of music do you like to listen to? And do you listen to music while you work?

Um, no. I don't really listen to music when I work. I really have to focus on one thing at a time. I like a lot of quiet and peace when I'm working or when I'm thinking or when I'm reading. For me, music is really about relaxation…a means which takes me outside of my usual thought processes. So film, music…anything, is purely entertainment. I grew up listening to Indian music, and watching primarily Indian films. And it was never that intellectually-driven or anything, but it was something that is close to my experience in my childhood, and I still enjoy that music. It's pure entertainment, but because of the sort of nostalgia attached to it, it becomes a space where I can really let go. So it remains such.

Blanca: Do you have any hobbies? What do you like to do in your free time?

I like driving. A lot. I think that's something I just enjoy the most. I can at a moment's notice, drive across the country if, you know, I had to.

Blanca: Do you like driving because you feel that... that is something you actually do have control of? Unlike your career?

No, I... I don't know, perhaps. Maybe. I like driving because I learned driving when I was 12. I went to a convent school. So when I drove to the convent with my father, I was probably 12 or 13. And I remember that I got a notice that if they saw me again, I would be expelled. It's something which I learned from my father, it's something that I learned fast, and I enjoyed it. One of those good things about Texas I really enjoyed was driving. I grew up with this idea of Western films. Believe me, TV, when I was young... your age... was always limited. There was no satellite, and we would see a lot of American Western films. So this whole idea of the West and the landscape and this sort of sublime of the landscape was really something that fascinated me. I remember one of the best and most thrilling times I had was when I drove from Providence to Houston in this Hyundai that I bought for $400 or $600,and all my things were in it. But it was really, really the highlight.

James: Is there any place in the world that you'd want to go to that you haven't been to, and if so, how would that affect your artwork?

I think professionally, I have, in the last sort of year or so, been interested in, perhaps, exhibiting more in Europe, because I've had more opportunity in the U.S. and, in comparison, less in Europe. And also because of the differences in the culture. My first sort of introduction of my work here was always through some of the miniature drawings. And since then, the work has expanded. So I was interested in not dragging that entire baggage around. So, given some opportunities, especially last year or so, when I exhibited my animations, I didn't necessarily show some of the more traditional-looking paintings. And nobody really wanted to create a comparison, and that was very interesting as an experiment for me—to see that that baggage was no longer being dragged. Whereas in the past here, whenever given an opportunity, if I've shown new work, sometimes, you know, where people leave little notes, I've almost always [had] people say, oh, they like the new work, but they also wish that I was doing the older paintings. So that is a personal thing, perhaps. I wanted to test, perhaps, seeing how I can be seen without that baggage.

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