The more recent appearance of the head on these rooted figures marks a shift from an examination of displacement to an expression of empowerment, mirroring the evolution of the artist’s own journey as an immigrant in the United States. These figures embody what Sikander calls “Migrant Love,” a term she uses to describe the central protagonists in her work. This iconography can be found elsewhere in Sikander’s practice, including a version in stained glass for the 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition Collective Behavior at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel. The exhibition is now on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art through June 2025 and will travel to the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University in September 2025.

In this context, Facing the Shadow and Squaring the Shadow suggest a direct confrontation—a reckoning with what is hidden, uncomfortable, or difficult to name. As Sikander notes, “These figures are autonomous and interconnected, self-rooted and migratory, vulnerable and resilient, visible yet invisible.” With drawing as the connective tissue in her practice, Sikander allows space for her artwork to inhabit multiple meanings, often as a way of affirming how women, deeply rooted in their identities and cultural heritage, cannot be easily uprooted or silenced.

For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Pakistan) has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for our present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums—paintings, drawings, prints, digital animations, mosaics, sculpture, and glass—Sikander considers Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that makes visible marginalized subjects. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States.

Sikander earned a B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. Her seminal thesis work, The Scroll, 1989–1990, which initiated the start of the neo-miniature movement, garnered awards, exhibitions and press, and led to increased enrollment in the NCA’s miniature painting department. Subsequently, Sikander was appointed lecturer in miniature painting at the school. The artist moved to the United States to pursue an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1993 to 1995; from 1995 to 1997, she participated in the Glassell School of Art’s CORE Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2006) and the State Department Medal of Arts (2012), Sikander’s innovative work has been exhibited and collected internationally.

A major new outdoor project, an 8-foot bronze female sculpture, is currently on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan. An accompanying 18-foot female sculpture was exhibited in Madison Square Park in 2023 and traveled to the University of Houston in 2024. Every midnight in September 2023, Sikander’s animation, Reckoning, 2020, unfolded across the screens of Times Square. Projects with the Moynihan Train Hall Public Art Program saw her animation Singing Suns, 2016, displayed across screens in Moynihan Train Hall from November 2023 to January 2024. A survey exhibition of Sikander’s work, Collective Behavior, opened in Venice during the Biennale Arte 2024 and was co-organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibitions in Cleveland and Cincinnati opened in February 2025. The exhibition will travel to the Cantor Arts Center in September 2025.