نسائیت (nisā'iyyat) Comes to Houston
Collective Behavior
Shahzia Sikander
Cantor Arts Center
Ongoing – January 25, 2026
Migrant Love, stenciled and sprayed, on pigmented handmade paper
THE ARTIST & HER INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCE
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is a career-spanning exhibition of the internationally renowned New York-based artist. For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) has been reframing Central and South Asian visual histories, and Central/South Asian-American histories through a contemporary feminist perspective.
Sikander is one of the leading artists of her generation. As part of a cohort of internationally aligned emerging artists in the 1990s, she crucially reshaped American art as it took a global turn heading into the twenty-first century.
Throughout her practice, she considers diasporic experiences, histories of colonialism and Western relations with the Global South and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her command of diverse mediums and traditions – from historical Indo-Persian miniature manuscript paintings to sculpture and digital animation – reveals a vibrant, visual vastness that reimagines the past for our present.
COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR
Rather than proceeding chronologically, Collective Behavior follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries throughout her works, rooted as they are in a recurring lexicon of forms, figures and features. Beginning with Sikander’s extraordinary undergraduate thesis, The Scroll, the exhibition explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, and a feminist artist. Perhaps most significantly, it situates Sikander as a transformative global citizen and artist committed to disrupting established historical narratives.
INDO/PERSIAN MINATURE MANUSCRIPT PAINTING & THE SCROLL
Sikander initially trained in the illustration tradition of classical Indo-Persian miniature painting, which is bounded by frames, borders, and precise architecture. From this, she developed her unique style, which fills these spaces with fluidity, fragmentation and fanciful surreal permutations resonant with a postmodern world and a contemporary feminist perspective.
Sikander studied, and began subverting, the techniques and compositions of Central and South Asian miniature painted manuscripts as she pursued her BFA at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. Her thesis, The Scroll, used this centuries-old visual language to show the artist’s daily life and kicked off a “neo-miniature” movement of contemporary artists reinterpreting this cultural legacy.
Segments of Sikander’s The Scroll telling the story of domestic life.
PORTRAITS
In 1995, Sikander received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Within a few years her work began appearing in major institutional group and solo exhibitions. Maintaining her focus on South Asian and Islamic visuals, she expanded her portraits to include fellow creatives, hip-hop icons, global politicians and poetic texts, as well as abstracted figures and repeating forms. Her compositions expanded from intimate manuscript pages into gallery-filling wall murals and hanging paper installations.
L to R: Segments of Desire Go Wandering Off, wasli paper, a type of handmade paper used specifically for painting miniatures. It was devised in India, in the 10th century.
Fixed Fluid, glass mosaic with a patinated brass frame
VIDEO
Stretching over several decades, Sikander’s iconoclastic multimedia exploration has expanded to encompass mosaics, sculpture and video. In the early 2000s, she began experimenting with video, initially capturing her miniature process in stop motion. Eventually, she began growing these works in scale and complexity with digital animation and high-definition video capture.
Adding duration, dynamic movement, and sonic dimensions to her precisely painted scenes, works like The Last Post become extended meditations on themes found elsewhere in her practice. Taking up one of Sikander’s most consistent concerns, The Last Post explores how entangled, long-obscured histories of globalization are key to understanding shared pasts, as well as present forces and possible futures.
Cells from Sikander’s video, The Last Post, addressing British colonialism in South Asia
SCULPTURE
In 2020, Sikander began creating bronze sculptures. Female figural explorations from decades of drawings emerged as three-dimensional presences first in the gallery and, in 2023 and 2024, as monumental public statuary in New York City and Houston, Texas.
Witness. Statue and detail. The statue was fist exhibited across from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (in Manhattan).
When Sikander’s work moved from New York City to the University of Houston, it was met with opposition. Protesters claimed the figure was offensive because it was a memorial to the late United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (with the lace collar on the figure) and was a “satanic” endorsement of abortion (with tentacle arms and braided hair twisted into like rams horns).
Several months later, with Hurricane Beryl providing cover for their actions, the statue was vandalized and beheaded by persons unknown. Despite the cameras that cover the University grounds, UH police have been unable to identify the culprits.
Upon being informed of the beheaving, Sikander decided that she wanted to leave the damage visible to onlookers. “I don’t want to ‘repair’ or conceal,” Sikander said. “I want to ‘expose,’ leave it damaged. Make a new piece, and many more.”
Over the course of her career, Sikander’s work has continually been featured in exhibitions and biennials, collected by public institutions around the world, and recognized with significant awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius” Grant), the Pollock Prize for Creativity and the US State Department Medal of Arts.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered at the 60th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition in 2024.
For more information about Sikander and the Cantors Art Center, click here.
