Occasioned by the exhibition Shahzia Sikander, Ecstasy as Sublime: Heart as Vector, on view at the MAXXI through January 15, 2017, RISD Global, MAXXI and the American Academy in Rome have organized a program of events, including an film screening, a panel discussion, and an artist talk exploring wider issues raised by Sikander’s practice, with special emphasis on drawing and video, and questions of difference.

Bending the Barrels, part of a series of video works made in South Asia between 2007 and 2009, is composed of footage shot at the Pakistani Military School of Music in Abbottabad. Through moving images overlaid with songs associated with Pakistan’s colonial past, Sikander trespasses in an all-male enclave and plays with military codes and rituals to complicate received stereotypes about passivity and bellicosity.

Drawing today still hangs in the balance between biology and thought, between identity and culture, between society and nature, between imagination and technological possibilities. Works on paper reveal the gaps between irreconcilable poles in human experience, embodying the ineptitude of authoritative solutions to slippages and glitches present in the “solutions” proposed by governments and institutions. Drawing, by its indexical quality and immediacy, is well equipped to reflect slippery subjectivity. It holds the potential to disentangle thinking from the impulses towards total solutions, inevitably totalitarian, through critical engagement with images, perceptions, objects and traditions.

Shahzia Sikander’s (b. 1969) deployment of the tradition of miniature painting articulates a radical lexicon. Interstitial space is central to the artist’s drawing and video compositions. History and storytelling feature prominently in Sikander’s work, which digs fearlessly into literary and visual canons across the proverbial East/West divide. Sikander’s diverse practice investigates the blurred boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, storytelling and history-writing calling into question issues around redaction, perception of authority and independence.

Other events in the program include:
Panel Discussion
Beyond Drawing
MAXXI B.A.S.E.
Via Guido Reni, 4A
30 November 2016 at 6:30pm
in English with simultaneous translation

This round-table, moderated by Hou Hanru, will take up the questions that Sikander’s work explores to cast them into a broader discussion about the potential to, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “productively undo” through drawing. And it will address the medium’s potential to imagine, as again Spivak suggests, “a new space that allows us to survive in the singular and unverifiable.”

Speakers include: Shahzia Sikander, Rashwan Abdelbaki, Dawn Clements, Tomaso De Luca, Anne Palopoli, and Prandeep Sharma.

Artist Talk
Shahzia Sikander
RISD EHP
Piazza Cenci, 56
1 December 2016 at 5pm
in English

Conversation and Workshop
MAXXI B.A.S.E.
Via Guido Reni, 4A
3 December 2016
11:30am - Conversation between Shahzia Sikander and Anna Melograno in English with simultaneous translation
3pm - Workshop with Shahzia Sikander in English