Collective Behavior

The following is an excerpt from the curators introduction by Emily Liebert and Ainsley M. Cameron in Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior (Monacelli, 2025). The catalogue documents the presentations of Collective Behavior in Venice, Cleveland, and Cincinnati with hundreds of images, immersing readers in Sikander’s vibrant and subversive art. Pick up a copy on-site during a visit to the exhibition this spring.

For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander has reanimated South Asian visual histories through a contemporary feminist perspective. In The Scroll (1989–90), Sikander’s undergraduate thesis project, the artist set in motion many of the ideas she would continue to explore across time, place, and medium. As Sikander would later reflect, it was this work that made her say, “I have found my language.”1 The Scroll was inspired by the technique and narrative expression of South and Central Asian manuscript painting histories, which Sikander had been studying at the National College of Arts (NCA) in her home city of Lahore, Pakistan. However, Sikander gives these visual vocabularies new meanings through key departures from the historically dominant themes, motifs, and compositional formats of the medium.

The Scroll is more than one foot high and more than five feet long, dimensions that greatly exceed the size and the format of historical manuscript painting and restrict the viewer from taking the work in at a glance. At once, a self-sufficient whole is fragmented. Time and three-dimensional space enter the work, and the viewer’s participation is required: she must physically move to assimilate the work’s pieces and follow the narrative as it unfolds, almost cinematically. The work centers on the artist as an adolescent who came of age during Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship (1978–88). With her back to us, this young girl wanders like a ghost through a domestic setting, one inspired by historical Safavid paintings and contemporary Pakistani architecture. As Aruna D’Souza has observed, Sikander’s female figures “seem to haunt, rather than merely occupy, the houses through which they move.”2 A haunting presence is one that troubles or disquiets, as Sikander herself does in her approach to the histories she reconfigures.

Sikander’s interpretation of the past encourages multiple ways of seeing, reading, and understanding history. Her deep art historical knowledge developed through her engagement with museum collections around the world—first through publications read as a student in Lahore and later through sustained research and ongoing dialogues with scholars and curators. Works including Elusive Realities (1989–2000), The Last Post (2010), Disruption as Rapture (2016), Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), Caesura (2021), and Liquid Light I and II (2024) are informed by these encounters with art history. Through careful study and radical reinvention, the visual language that Sikander established in The Scroll, and that continues in her practice today, merges past and present by creating fantastical and subversive sociopolitical connections across time and space.

From Venice to Cleveland and Cincinnati, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date. It reveals the evolution of Sikander’s practice since The Scroll, up to and including new site-specific works. Neither the exhibitions nor their catalogue follows a chronological or linear approach. Instead, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries, as well as her lexicon of forms, as they have appeared in different manifestations throughout her career. The works in Sikander’s oeuvre make meaning on their own and interdependently. This project is structured to emphasize the ways that Sikander’s strategies of visual and conceptual accumulation have, over time, produced a commanding “collective behavior.” As the lasting document of this project, the catalogue for Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior offers new entry points into Sikander’s work.