Shahzia Sikander Books

Growing up in a multigenerational, multicultural home in Lahore, Pakistan, where her family’s Muslim traditions are filled with food, rituals, and love, Shahzia is a tomboy who loves skateboarding, biking, swimming, and flying her kite. She also loves stories of all kinds and is always surrounded by books. At the Catholic school she attends, she studies Western literature, and at home, her father regales her and her siblings with fantastical tales from a Russian storybook on animals. Shahzia’s love for books leads to a fascination with illustrations, like the ones she sees in illuminated manuscripts and South Asian miniature portraits, and she discovers a talent for drawing. She soon realizes that making art is much like learning a new language—it requires practice and hard work, but it gives her a new tool to express herself. Through art, Shahzia is able to create the different worlds she reads about, using her imagination to take her beyond the walls of the home she grows up in.   Written by artist Shahzia Sikander herself and featuring a new painting created especially for the book alongside artwork from her private archive and MoMA’s collection, Shahzia: My Life as an Artist is a colorful introduction to a multicultural perspective that will inspire young readers to use art and imagination to explore new worlds. 

"This catalog accompanies Shahzia Sikanders first solo show in the UK. Shahzia Sikanders work engages with the tradition of miniature painting as a way to focus on the contradictions of scale versus labor, precision versus gesture, and formal versus subjective. This discipline enabled her to connect with a particular aspect of Pakistani art and history that had been reduced to kitsch for the tourist market place; understand the original significance of miniatures; and reinvest the form with her present-day images and concerns.However, and importantly, her work resists clicȟ and categorization avoiding labeling which confines its reading to that of singular cultural origin or identity. In both small and large-scale gouaches, wall paintings and digital animations, layering is employed as both a technique and metaphor." -- Artist's website