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Saturday, January 19, 2013
Pakistani artist honoured with US Medal of Arts
* US secretary of state confers award on Shahzia Sikander at State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms in WashingtonPakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander has been honoured, along with four other contemporary artists, with the State Department’s inaugural Medal of Arts at a luncheon ceremony at the department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms in Washington.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conferred the award on the artist. Sikander’s work was highlighted during an exhibition in the US Consulate in Karachi in 2011 and is now on permanent display. The award acknowledges the artists’ outstanding commitment to the Art in Embassies programme and to international cultural exchange. Shahzia Sikander, an extraordinary artist from Pakistan now living in the United States has been instrumental in reviving an old tradition, miniature painting. She has invested it with new meanings and new possibilities.
Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, and currently lives and works in New York City. She holds a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work spans a variety of mediums, including drawing, large-scale wall installations, animation and video. Sikander has successfully brought Indo-Persian miniature painting into the realm of contemporary art through
Sikander’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Her work has been exhibited at venues world wide including major solo surveys at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Australia (both 2007). She also participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 2005 Venice Biennial.
Among her many recognitions, Sikander was appointed a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2006. She is also the recipient of The Louis comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1997), the Tamgha-e-imtiaz, Medal of Excellence award from the government of Pakistan (2005), and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2006).
Those honoured along with her at the ceremony are: Carrie Mae Weems, Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang and Kiki Smith. Speaking at the award ceremony, Sikandar said “I think a lot of my work is really also about translation. The distance between the original or the idea of the original and what may be an interpretation or something even. And what is that distance? And I think even in this particular work, I Am Also Not My Own Enemy; it opens up that dialogue like who is the enemy here or not? And it also refers actually to Maha Halip’s phrase, a poet. It is his text borrowed from his language. And again, it’s in Ortu but it’s written in English. And the way it’s painted also it references the US colors.”
With an eye towards cultural exchange and visual diplomacy, Art in Embassies creates permanent and temporary art exhibitions in over 200 diplomatic venues worldwide.
Shahzia Sikander further says that she thinks as an artist, as an individual, as a person. “I think a lot of the information surrounds us. And it’s how much you’re absorbing. And so a lot of it is called from newspapers, from history books, from other artists who are from literature, everything. I think the culture at large. And then it’s also about how much of it becomes part of your own language. So I think I’m interested in that process. Like what does it mean to own something? The act of ownership. Because again, the interest in miniature painting was removed from a culture specificity.
She adds: “It wasn’t because one was from Pakistan or studying there that you have to do miniature painting. It was a very objective non-nostalgic interest in learning something and understanding it. The context, its history. And then getting interested in sort of a floodgate that happened. There was so much to process, to juxtapose as well as see it through the lens of the colonial history, too. So I think there’s not one place through which I’m accessing ideas but several places.” daily times monitor
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk