Shahzia Sikander’s ‘3 to 12 Nautical Miles’: Synecdoche as Visual Language

Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, and presented by UBS, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles by Shahzia Sikander is a cinematic tableau comprising hand-painted images. In this interview conducted by Ariadne Long, Associate Curator of Visual Art, and Ulanda Blair, Curator of Moving Image, the artist reflects on her longstanding interest in miniature painting, her research on colonial histories and legacies, and the principles that underscore her artistic practice.

Sikander’s interdisciplinary art offers a unique lens through which to explore colonial and global histories anchored in Asian visual culture. Her selection for the 2026 co-commission foregrounds her ability to create visually poetic moving image art that directly engages with the complex historical and geographical context of Hong Kong. At the same time, her commitment to expressing fluidity and porosity across cultures and art forms creates a rich space for audience imagination and interpretation, allowing each viewer to derive personal meaning from the collective public experience.

The new M+ Facade commission 3 to 12 Nautical Miles (2026) uses your signature animation The Last Post (2010) as a conceptual springboard, furthering your exploration of colonial power in Asia. Can you share more insights into this new work? Perhaps we can start with the title?

3 to 12 Nautical Miles takes its title from the legal expansion of territorial waters—the zone of sea a nation can claim as its own. This shifting boundary reflects changing ideas about sovereignty, control, and the legal frameworks of empire. The work unfolds as a cinematic tableau, composed of drawings in fluid materials such as ink and gouache, with imagery that is animated and set in motion, taking cues from the Opium Wars.

Historically, the weakening of Mughal sovereignty under Akbar II, the decline of Qing authority in China, and the rise of the British East India Company were not separate historical developments, but rather a single interconnected imperial system. As Mughal power eroded, the East India Company filled the vacuum and gained territorial control in India, reorganising land, taxation, and agriculture, turning regions like Bengal and Bihar into sites of large-scale opium cultivation. Indian peasants, revenue systems, and colonial armies were mobilised to support British global trade.

Simultaneously, China’s Qing dynasty faced internal challenges that limited its control over foreign trade and the social consequences of opium. When Qing officials resisted, British naval power, backed by Indian revenues and soldiers, enforced commercial demands through war. Maritime dominance linked production and consumption across Asia, redistributing power globally: Britain expanded its empire, India became a source of imperial wealth and labour, Hong Kong was seized as a colonial outpost, and China suffered territorial loss and economic destabilisation. This history demonstrates that empire functioned through interdependence and coercion. Political decline in one region enabled exploitation in another, while military and legal systems enforced unequal exchange across borders. 3 to 12 Nautical Miles captures this system of extraction in animated form, visualising the interconnected, global scale of colonial power and its enduring legacies.

Across different mediums, your artwork often features portraits, female figures, and religious and mythological iconography. Can you tell us about these recurring symbols, as well as those that appear in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles?

The visual lexicon in my work has come about through a recurring set of images, forms, gestures, symbols, and material choices that function like a language over time. This process is gradual, intuitive, and shaped by lived experience as much as by formal decisions. Characters throughout my work are often reimagined archetypal protagonists that can exemplify timelessness, movement, and courage to tell richer and nuanced stories. I love expanding a repertoire of feminine characters born from reflection on women’s connections through memory, stories, collective consciousness.^[1]

As a young artist, as I studied western art history, I began critically dissecting the orientalist large, glossy coffee-table books on Asian, Indian, and Islamic art. These publications often relied on rigid categories, such as miniature, ceramics, weapons, tapestries, carpets, calligraphy, always presented in simplified, repetitive ways. Objects were isolated, flattened, and stripped of context. Over time, I started to imagine these shadowless depictions of objects as restless entities, almost small monsters with bodily functions, waiting to be reanimated, to step out of the pages and claim agency of their own.

This act of animating objects through a feminist lens, into characters and protagonists, became an inventive and ironic response to colonial histories of dispersal and rupture: the practices of collecting, archiving, categorising, and institutionalising the art and material culture of colonised societies. By giving these objects movement, voice, and presence, I sought to undo their historical containment and reimagine them as active participants rather than passive artefacts.

The iconography that emerged formed a repertoire of figures, often female and sometimes androgynous. These figures carry ideas of severance, absence, censorship, and renewal, shaped also by my interest in how Asian painted manuscripts were fragmented, dispersed, and subjected to violence, a fate shared by much South and East Asian sculpture under colonial histories of war and rupture.

This approach continues in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. Motifs and trenchant historical symbols are given shifting identities as they come together to cultivate new associations through movement, repetition, velocity, and magnitude. The piece opens and closes with the motif of the shamsa, or sunburst, a symbol of illumination and the passage of light. The circular form moves and morphs from floral pattern to fire, from figuration to foliation. At the centre of the radiant disk appear two female portraits—not specific individuals but figures that suggest a collective presence, whose synchronised movement generates a sense of power, and radiating light.

The throne appears in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles as a symbol of power always at risk of unravelling. By placing the throne within a maritime and animated space, its authority becomes unsettled. It reflects how imperial power persists through legal frameworks, economic routes, and territorial claims, even as its visible forms change. The throne also carries historical memory. Across time, thrones have been occupied, overthrown, moved, or emptied, but their symbolic force continues.

The poppy carries the violent entanglement of pleasure, addiction, and empire. It collapses beauty and devastation into a single image. In animation, its capacity to bloom, dissolve, and recur allows it to function as a temporal loop rather than a historical footnote.

Cartography recurs as a central visual language, with maps used as instruments of power. This is made explicit in the figure of Queen Victoria wearing a map of India and Hong Kong as a necklace. Territorial domination is absorbed into the body of imperial selfhood. Vast geographies are rendered portable; extraction becomes adornment, conquest becomes refinement.

The British vessel appears as a moving infrastructure that carried law, commerce, violence, and ideology in tandem. The sampan indicates informal labour and survival economies that exist beneath and alongside imperial trade narratives. Unlike the grand vessels of empire, the sampan is scale-less and adaptive, slipping between regimes, borders, and historical epochs.

3 to 12 Nautical Miles shines new light on the ever-changing maps of the world, revisiting historic trade routes from the nineteenth century to the present, and exploring the shifting networks of power, empire, and control over the past two centuries. What draws you to these complex and loaded geopolitical histories, and how do they inform the visual language of your work?

I am drawn to complex geopolitical histories because they reveal the networks of power, empire, and extraction that continue to shape the world today. Power in the time of the East India Company is not so different from contemporary structures: it operates across nations and boundaries through corporations and supranational institutions, and empire now takes the form of a transnational ideology of global privatisation and acquisition. All resources, including language, labour, and human intelligence, are gathered under the rubric of monetisation. Much of my work explores these interstices, the transitory, the mythos of the migrant and the citizen, women and power, the colonised, the artist—all those that are caught between worlds, artistic vocabularies, cultures, practices, and histories.

The way history is told and who gets to tell it is shaped by power. Certain voices have traditionally been granted authority, while others have been ignored or erased. Recognising and challenging these historical and institutional constraints, and the enduring hierarchies of innovation and modernity within art historical narratives, sharpens my understanding of how Western wealth and cultural authority are intertwined with silos of knowledge. This awareness informs my work’s formal logic, which emphasises circulation, relationality, and layered temporalities.

Your 2016 exhibition Apparatus of Power at Hong Kong’s Asia Society established a critical dialogue with the city’s colonial history. How does your current perspective on Hong Kong relate to or diverge from the historical dialogues you presented at that time? A decade later, what continuities and ruptures do you observe?

My Hong Kong exhibition Apparatus of Power (2016) was conceived in direct dialogue with the city’s colonial architecture, maritime history, and strategic role as a node of imperial exchange. Situated within a former British military explosives compound, the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre was an active historical interlocutor. Its architecture embedded in systems of surveillance, defence, and control mirrored the exhibition’s central concern with how power is structured and aestheticised.

A decade later, my engagement with Hong Kong in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles is continuous in its concern with empire, maritime power, and visual regimes of authority. There is continuity in my sustained interest in who has the authority to narrate history and how images participate in that authority. However, there is also a divergence: my earlier exhibition approached Hong Kong as a historical hinge within global empire, mapping imperial systems and visual languages, while my current thinking grapples more directly with what it means to inhabit the aftershocks of those systems, where history is no longer an object of study but an active condition. In 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, dispersed histories converge. This convergence is not merely historical, but visual and cinematic. What was once perhaps latent or implied becomes explicitly systemic.

Viewing your new animation on the giant M+ Facade will, of course, be different from experiencing your paintings in a gallery. While a painting invites detailed and prolonged engagement, the M+ Facade dynamically interacts with its busy surroundings along Victoria Harbour. As someone who has pioneered new forms of miniature painting, how do you think about this shift in scale and modes of spectatorship?

3 to 12 Nautical Miles speaks in a public, unavoidable register. Such a medium and scale allows my work to exist outside the confines of the museum and function in the public domain. Being displayed on the façade of M+, the animation literally enters the visual economy of the city, permeating ferry routes, trade corridors, and nightly commutes. The work does not ask permission to be encountered, but rather asserts itself into the city’s rhythm, implicating Hong Kong’s present-day visibility, finance, and infrastructure in the historical systems it visualises.

What I find so extraordinary about this shift in scale and mode of spectatorship is that the moving image will occupy the same horizon once traversed by colonial ships and transform M+’s exterior into a contemporary screen for imperial afterlives.

For many years, you have collaborated closely with animator Patrick O’Rourke and musician Du Yun on your moving image works. O’Rourke, for example, was your collaborator for 3 to 12 Nautical Miles and Du Yun will score the gallery version. How do these interdisciplinary collaborations impact your art and creative thinking? Can you discuss the creative and philosophical translation of your painting practice into video?

Critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration are the three principles that ground my understanding of what it means to be an artist. My practice operates at the intersections of culture, society, and economy, and within the ways communities form, interact, and sustain themselves. These overlapping spaces are where I see art functioning, and interdisciplinary collaboration amplifies that understanding. My decades-long collaborations with Patrick O’Rourke and Du Yun have been rooted in shared visual rhythm, and a mutual investment in a multivalent, multidimensional form, and state of experience.

With Patrick, our work sustains a dialogue where software does not dictate form. Animation and video are processes of transformation: breaking forms apart and rebuilding them, exploring movement and temporality to extend dialogues begun in static images. Video allows me to animate the tension between control and improvisation; to make visible the layering, evolution of forms, and interplay of stillness and motion already present in the work on paper.

Du Yun’s engagement with polyphonic rhythm is about textural convergence and accumulation of sound, a process that I find intuitively familiar. The scale and intensity of her sonic language resonate with my reliance on highly saturated colour as an emotional register. We share an approach that moves between classical or traditional forms and their transformation through internal reworking and improvisation, balancing playfulness with rigour.

You studied miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, in the 1990s, transforming a relatively conservative painting tradition into a powerful tool for contemporary expression. What drew you to miniature painting, and how have you navigated its traditional parameters to engage with contemporary discourse, then and now?

My first encounter with an original miniature painting before I was a teenager was at someone’s house in Lahore. Although I only saw one or two works, I was immediately captivated by the density of detail and the extraordinary precision of the hand. But I only learned about its academic transmission after enrolling at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore.

Although NCA was a haven for creative exploration, it was shaped by hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptual art dominated critical discourse, while miniature painting was dismissed as backward and irrelevant in 1987 when I joined the NCA. I was unsettled by the ease with which it was rejected without first understanding the nature of its resistance within the institution. The impulse to look closely at what was being refused became a generative point of entry.

As I began analysing non-Western visual languages through application rather than nationalism, I understood that language is something an artist must actively find. My growing interest in miniature painting also emerged from the recognition that what was labelled ‘tradition’ was fragmented and precarious. 

At NCA, miniature painter Bashir Ahmad, trained by Sheikh Shujaullah and Haji Sharif, occupied a visibly disempowered position. His steadfast devotion to tradition stood in contrast to dominant models of success shaped by overseas exposure. Questions of how tradition is defined, who is authorised to carry it, and how it is disseminated became a sustained preoccupation for me. Rather than perceiving this gap as a limitation, I was drawn to it. Within that absence, I sensed the possibility of rethinking and reorganising how indigenous practices might be understood—not as static or nostalgic forms, but as critical, living languages capable of renewed relevance.

The Scroll (1989–1990), my NCA thesis, emerged as the tipping point, laying to rest the debate about miniature’s inability to engage the youth, and launched what is now known as the Neo-Miniature movement.  After completing The Scroll, I felt a personal urgency to reimagine miniature painting beyond its regional, nostalgic, and often trite usage.

I became deeply invested in miniature painting once I understood how European colonial legacies shaped the fate of premodern Central and South Asian manuscript traditions, how manuscripts were dismembered and dispersed, and how Western cultural authority was shaped by histories of trade, extraction, and exchange. Mughal miniature painting, for me, emerged as an early global visual system, one that was relational, serial, layered, and conceptually sophisticated, whose contributions have been positioned as peripheral rather than constitutive.

My interest in reworking miniature painting comes from a desire to question these power structures, particularly through feminist perspectives that reconsider whose stories matter and how they are represented. I do not believe that art possesses a single, fixed meaning. I am interested in history, in politics and in the dynamism of form. Form as something alive and in conversation with its time, space, and language. My journey has been about creating an emotional, not only an intellectual dialogue with miniature painting within a changing geopolitical order around global art, where formal, cultural, and geographic boundaries remain porous.