Nemesis

Shahzia Sikander | 2002 | Digital animation | Colour | Sound | 2 min. 2 sec.

Marking her first venture into digital moving image, Sikander’s Nemesis traces the slow metamorphosis of anthropomorphic figures and animal forms into a monumental elephant assembled from individual figures.  As the disparate elements accumulate and interlock, they form a single, commanding presence.

SpiNN

Shahzia Sikander | 2003 | Digital animation | Colour | Sound | 6 min. 38 sec.

SpiNN unfolds inside a Mughal durbar, a space historically reserved for male authority. Gopis, the consorts of the Hindu deity Krishna, multiply and engulf the scene, asserting a collective female agency. Their bodies then fade and dissolve, leaving only their hair. The detached locks of hair move through the frame, becoming a source of disruption and instability as they repeatedly obscure the central figure, an image of America’s Lady Justice.  

Dissonance to Detour

Shahzia Sikander | 2005 | Digital animation | Colour | Sound | 3 min. 30 sec.

In Dissonance to Detour, animated script is treated as a dynamic visual force. Words rotate, spiral, and move in the same way as Sikander’s drawn motifs, collapsing the traditional hierarchy between text and image. European dealers imposed this separation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when miniature paintings were often removed from their textual context for sale. Undoing this long-standing separation within a kinetic, fluid space, Sikander has restored text and image to equal status.

The Last Post

Shahzia Sikander | 2010 | HD digital animation | Colour | Sound | 10 min.

Music score and sound design by Du Yun

The Last Post features a Company Man in a red coat, a figure symbolising the East India Company’s colonial power. Around him, Indian court architecture, Chinese cut-paper silhouettes, and a watercolour map of South Asia break apart, dissolve, and reconfigure. The geographical variety of the elements reflects the Company’s sprawling influence from the 1600s to the 1800s, when state, military, and mercantile power were indistinguishably intertwined.  The fractured images move across the screen, echoing the imperial activity that reverberated across continents, oceans, and time.

Parallax

Shahzia Sikander | 2013 | 3-channel single-image HD digital animation | Colour | Sound | 15 min. 26 sec.

Music score and sound design by Du Yun

Developed following a year-long residency in the United Arab Emirates, Parallax draws on the layered past of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, including its occupation by Portuguese and British imperial forces, its role in the East India Company’s trade networks, and its current-day strategic significance. Sikander’s fluid visuals are paired with operatic passages interwoven with epic poems read in Arabic by Sharjah-based poets, deepening the animation’s themes of oil extraction, migratory flows, and climate change.

Singing Suns 

Shahzia Sikander | 2016 | HD digital animation | Colour | Sound | 3 min. 24 sec.

Music score and sound design by Du Yun

In Singing Suns, Sikander reworks the iconography of the gopi, traditionally depicted in South Asian manuscript paintings as female devotees of the male Hindu deity Krishna. Here, Sikander has removed all reference to Krishna. Instead, a gopi’s silhouetted head and flowing hair become a motif that multiplies, migrates, and morphs across the screen, fluctuating between solid and fluid states to form the ‘suns’ in the work’s title. Separated from the body’s historically gendered frame, the image of head and hair is transformed into an autonomous entity and symbol of feminine power.

Disruption As Rapture

Shahzia Sikander | 2016 | HD digital animation | Colour | Sound | 10 min. 7 sec.

Music score and sound design by Du Yun featuring Ali Sethi; animation by Patrick O’Rourke. Commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Disruption as Rapture was created in response to an eighteenth-century Indian manuscript, Gulshan e Ishq’s (Rose Garden of Love), currently part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s holdings. Its richly illuminated text recounts a Hindu love story reimagined through a Sufi cosmology, embodying a highly diverse landscape of devotional imagery. A similar diversity features in Sikander’s work, which incorporatesIndo-Persian manuscript painting, South Asian lyrical poetry, Urdu lyrics, western Opera, orchestral music, Indian ragas, and Gregorian chants.

Reckoning

Shahzia Sikander | 2020 | HD digital animation | Colour | Sound | 4 min. 16 sec.

Music score and sound design by Du Yun featuring Zeb Bangash; animation by Patrick O’Rourke

In Reckoning, the central forms shift endlessly back and forth, alternating between two warrior-like figures, engaged in either combat or a dance, and flowering branches that seem to intertwine. Sikander evokes the experience of all those who move between identities and histories: transients, migrants, citizens, women, authorities, the colonized, artists—anyone caught between worlds, artistic vocabularies, cultures, practices, and histories.