Shahzia Sikander: High Seas; Closed Skies

Victoria Miro is delighted announce High Seas; Closed Skies, the gallery’s first exhibition by Shahzia Sikander since announcing representation of the New York-based artist.

A focal point of High Seas; Closed Skies is Shahzia Sikander's acclaimed new animation, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. The work is a radiant cinematic tableau that navigates the enduring currents of power and trade that have shaped the global landscape from the nineteenth century to the contemporary era.

Animated from hand-painted images, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles traces the entangled histories linking the British East India Company, Mughal India and Qing China through objects and symbols that signal how authority was constructed, distributed and contested. The work interrogates Britain’s opium cultivation in India, its coercive trade with China and the First Opium War, exposing the mechanisms of imperial extraction and the deep power asymmetries between Britain and China at the time. Its title refers to the incremental expansion of territorial waters: the legal zone between three and twelve nautical miles from any coastline where sovereignty can be asserted, contested and enforced.

Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel and presented by UBS, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles received its debut this spring in Hong Kong (where it is on view until 21 June), transforming the exterior of M+ into an immersive screen within the cityscape, and in doing so aligning subject with setting, past with present. The work now comes to London, the city in which the East India Company was chartered, where decisions that turned Bengal into an opium production system were ratified, and through which Hong Kong was seized as a colonial outpost. Here, the work will be heard for the first time with its score, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. The exhibition also features new mosaics and works on paper.

Image: Still of Shahzia Sikander, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, 2026
Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel
Courtesy the artist