Shahzia Sikander on Indian and Persian Illuminated Manuscripts | Collection in Focus

My name is Shazia Sikander. I'm a visual artist. I'm also an educator and a research-based painter. And today we have done sort of a nosedive into some gorgeous pages that belong in the Morgans collection of a range of illuminated manuscripts from Central and South Asia. I often understand them as Indian and Persian, so the term Indo-Persian. They have centuries of histories that kind of embraces illuminated manuscripts, albums. They do come from the practice of language and visual text and language. So writing plays a very strong role and every generation of artists has represented them in their own ways. For me, having access to such works is such a privilege. The privilege of encountering paintings made by artists from a very different era, and here I am in this time and space, able to see them with such intimacy. And that is so, so exciting for me as a painter. Many of these works offer different things. So the ones that are incredibly full of color, I can understand the way color has been laid out, how different hues come together, how different colors sync up to each other, the tension they create, the surface they knit. Color is such an important vehicle in these works because it has a body. It has an opacity. And then different pigments have been added to that sort of body of color. The flowers are colored in that magenta against the orange of the body, against the white, the white against the green, choices of blues and the shades of violet that sums all of it together. Playing with transparency, translucency, and opaqueness allows the hand and the gesture and the mark to register. I've had almost 30 years of looking at this material for points of inspiration. Every time I return back, I have a different relationship to it. It becomes like a document that offers visual information as well as its history. It offers an insight into its very oftentimes political history. Histories are often constructed by the highest bidder. So there is no one way in which we have to understand this art form, but it is, I think, important to understand its complexity and to understand how it's framed and brought to us and to question the way art history frames the other. So in that sense, I feel that I can create a link to that history as being part of that history or part of that tradition in the sense that I also yearn to tell a story. If I'm looking at this work, it could be a generic subject matter, Radha Krishna, the binary of male-female, but at the same time, as somebody who wants to center female narratives, what could I do with that? I have worked with such an image where I've removed the male entity and figured out how to give a center stage to the feminine representation and what else can I do to play with that form to almost make it into a kinetic idea. How, as an artist, can I disrupt that and still keep its integrity there, engaging with history, but not necessarily glorifying it? So my engagement with this work is almost making an anti-monument. Seeing one painting is one thing, but when I see multiple, I'm really moving from one world into the other, sometimes over a century or more. And in your head, you have to fill in the gaps, and that's exciting for me as an artist to use imagination to link things together. That's how I see all of these works. They all carry incredible open universes inside, like world after world. The Morgan Library has incredible collections of Indo-Persian art. I find that the most powerful idea of the encounter here is that it wants you to slow down. It'll open itself up in new ways, and you will start slowly understanding more and more.