Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander at the Asia Society - New York - Brief Article

"Conversations with Traditions" featured sum of two units female painters--one Indian, one Pakistani--who work in the miniature tradition. However, the exhibition demonstrates that "tradition" can be a loaded terminus In the postcolonial world, traditional art forms have advance to be identified with nationalism, and they repeatedly serve as tools for contemporary artists wishing to explore compounded issues of politics, cultural identity and personal experience.

While exemplifying this phenomenon, the present to view also asks: whose tradition? Nilima Sheikh is an Indian artist whose family had to hasten away what is now Pakistan following the partition of the subcontinent on independence in 1947. Shahzia Sikander, who is a generation younger, was raised in Pakistan and now lives in the U These facts of time and geography have shaped the way they deal with the miniature tradition.

As an art scholar in Pakistan, Sikander became adept at mingling antithetical turn of expressions Given the political and religious tensions that separate Pakistan and India, the juxtaposition of motifs from the Hindu Rajput tradition with Muslim relations from Mughal painting creates a dissonance, single that her American audiences may not grasp.

Works in Sikander's section of the exhibition range from pieces produc right after art place of education to new commissions for this display With the exception of the greatest in quantity recent work, she employs mixes of vegetable coloring liquor dry pigment, watercolor, gold leaf and plane tea on traditional wasli paper, and in greatest in quantity cases keeps to the manuscript-page scale and format of traditional miniatures. The earliest work here is The roll of paper [i]or[/i] parchment (1991), a long, horizontal painting that departs from this format to provide a vision of the interior of a many-chambered present Pakistani house. The architecture has been render free of accessed up and stretched out upon a single plane so that we can go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the progress of a mysterious white-clad figure from space to room. The painting is remarkable the two for its detail and its dreamlike periodical emphasis By the mid '90s, Sikander was mixing Mughal, Rajput and Western motifs in tightly painted collagelike compositions. Mythical beasts, naked women in translucent veils, Hindu goddesse and snatches of landscape are dismantled, laid upon top of each other and intermixed in a way that parallels the composite nature of the artist's hold hybrid identity. In one new work, two snake-bodied figures strike one as being imprisoned behind a pair of fire-arms whose barrels have been twisted into a pretzel shape; in another, a woman in a sari and a Western bare face off beneath a entertainer of Asian angels. In a digital work upon a computer screen, a traditional-looking tableau of a woman and a long-horned ibex is the base for a kaleidoscopic collection of slowly changing images, body s and symbols.

Sheikh, whose work is shaped through her exposure to traditional Indian tales and folk carols as well as actual occurrences gives a greater emphasis to narrative. Her fluid paintings of tempera upon handmade paper feature loosely drawn figures and landscape simple bodys in diaphanous fields of delicately washed color. The earliest work here, the 12-panel When Champa Grew Up (1984) is based upon both a true story and a folk carol It illustrates the "dowry murder" of a young bride through her in-laws. We see the heroine progres from a playful schoolgirl upon a bicycle to an abused young wife cowering in her husband's family's household and then put ablaze in the kitchen. In the last sum of two units panels, hired mourners in a tight black circle raise their arms toward the heavens as she rises above the sooty vapor like an ascending angel.

More new works touch on other aspects of female suffering. Another piece, also based upon a true story, depicts a clump of despairing women who somberly climb a staircase to cast themselves into a large well. The blooming tints and delicate lines that define setting and figures imbue the tragic exhibition with a dreamlike quality. Other works exhibit with the same rhetorical hold houses obliterated, women being abducted and exiles trudging across an without contents land.

This was an inspired pairing. Together, Sikander and Sheikh make a powerful case for the continued relevance of traditional art forms by the agency of dismantling the supposed dichotomy between elderly and new.

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