Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice, on view April 20–October 20, 2024. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum, Collective Behavior is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. This is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together nearly 40 pieces made over the past 35 years, including new site-specific drawings and glass works created for the exhibition. 

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 make 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. 

In Venice, Collective Behavior revealed the evolution of Sikander’s practice since The Scroll, including new site-specific works that respond to the architecture and history of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, the city of Venice, and its global impact on trade and artistic exchange. Rather than proceeding chronologically, this exhibition followed Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries as they have taken form throughout her work, gaining power over time.

In Cleveland, the CMA presents Sikander’s art in relation to South Asian objects from the museum’s collection that have inspired her. This exhibition offers a narrative that the CMA is uniquely suited to share: it carries forward in time the rich histories that are encompassed in the museum’s renowned South Asian collection. Simultaneously, it situates contemporary artistic practice in relation to the global history that precedes it. The Cincinnati Art Museum concurrently offers a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s career to date. 

Unfolding across continents, these three exhibitions—in Venice, Cleveland, and Cincinnati—offer multiple vantages for engaging with Sikander’s remarkable career. Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is accompanied by a vividly illustrated catalogue featuring scholarly and poetic responses to the artist’s work.

Sikander’s artistic training began in Lahore, Pakistan, where she studied historic manuscript painting at the National College of the Arts (NCA). Following her acclaimed undergraduate thesis project, The Scroll (1989–90), she became the first woman to teach in the NCA’s prestigious miniature painting department. In 1993, Sikander moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to pursue graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After completing her MFA, Sikander moved to Houston, Texas, to participate in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Glassell School of Art from 1995 to 1997. She then moved to New York City, her primary base to date.