Conversation (In-person)
Loss, Longing, Belonging: Shahzia Sikander’s Khorfakkan Series
Join us March 7 for this exciting dialogue, presented by NYU Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective with 19 Washington Square North and co-sponsored by the Grey Art Gallery.
Alongside the opening of the exhibition of the work of Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander at 19WSN, we invite you to a dialogue between Sikander and Gayatri Gopinath (Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, NYU). Sikander’s photographs, initially taken in 2012, depict the ruin and desolation of a South Asian movie theater and its sole caretaker in Khorfakkan, Sharjah, and speak poignantly to the questions of home, displacement, belonging, and unbelonging that touch the lives of many South Asian migrants in the UAE.
Renowned Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Sikander has been the recipient of many notable awards, including most recently the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize in 2022, as well as the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art in 2015, a Medal of Art by the U.S. Department of State in 2012, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. In 2021, in conjunction with her major traveling exhibition, an extensive monograph on the artist was published. Entitled Extraordinary Realities, the publication is an examination of Sikander’s work from 1987 to 2003. Sikander’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas; the Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island; Jesus College in Cambridge, United Kingdom; the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada; and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Most recently, her public installation Havah… to breathe, air, life is currently on view at the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Visitor Access and Registration
Please RSVP here to attend this in-person event.