When Shahzia Sikander presented a miniature painting ‘The Scroll’ at her degree show at the National College of Arts in 1991, she spearheaded a visual revolution, the likes of which Pakistani art has yet to encounter. She used the vocabulary of traditional miniature to present a contemporary zeitgeist and thus spawned a new generation of artists who practised in the neo-miniature tradition.

Sikander owed the learning of the rigours of her craft to Bashir Ahmed but her conceptual understanding of the medium would be credited to Zahoor-ul-Akhlaq. Since then Sikander has gone on to expand the idiomatic centrality of miniature to large scale works on paper (60 inches x 90 inches), video projections on the side of massive buildings, digital animation with sound effects, incorporated poetry and dance performances.

Her most recent project ‘Parallax’, a massive, high definition, three-channeled video projection with surround sound is complex and multilayered in its content consisting of hundreds of drawings. Sikander may be considered one of Pakistan’s most cerebral artists; one who has changed the discourse of art through her considered interruption of convention, replacing it with thoughts and techniques of well-grounded contemporaneity.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 29th, 2015

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