Shahzia Sikander

Over the past 17 years, Shahzia Sikander has worked within the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting--creating a dialogue with a traditional form of art while engaging in a transformative task. Over the years, she has built a practice which seeks to understand miniature painting's historical significance as well as its contemporary relevance. This artist's book, which features many paper changes, gatefolds and a die-cut cover, brings the reader through Sikander's practice, which now embraces various media, from drawing and painting to animation. It accompanies Sikander's first major solo museum exhibition in Europe--at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin--and provides an overview of her work up to 2006. It features essays by the noted Harvard cultural theorist Homi Bhabha and the exhibition curator and noted writer on Modern and contemporary art, Sean Kissane.

Free of being prescribed while using a very prescribed and structured form. I like that tension. Miniature painting comes with a set of rules˜It's the materiality, the seductiveness of the surface, the investment, the submission, the hours that are put in˜In the end, they are very meditative and meaningful gestures, like ritual. In this sense, miniature painting is more about subverting modernity than subverting tradition. --Shahzia Sikander (from the interview with Bhabha)