Victoria Miro is delighted to announce the representation of Shahzia Sikander in partnership with Sean Kelly Gallery. The New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, entitled High Seas; Closed Skies, will take place in London this summer (5 June–31 July), featuring her acclaimed new animation 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, which debuted this spring at M+ in Hong Kong.
Few artists have so fundamentally transformed the form they were trained in as Shahzia Sikander, who took the centuries-old discipline of Central and South Asian manuscript painting and made it entirely, irreversibly new. Sikander’s practice over the past three decades has been a sustained act of expansion across painting, video animation, mosaic and sculpture. Iconoclastic in nature, her work moves through gender, sexuality, racial narratives and colonial histories, engaging ideas of language, trade, empire and migration through fluid and surreal permutations. It is postmodern in its appetite, feminist in its convictions, and has been pivotal in establishing art of the South Asian diaspora as a strand of the contemporary American tradition, while simultaneously achieving global significance, garnering widespread critical acclaim and achieving prominence worldwide.
A focal point of High Seas; Closed Skies, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles 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, the work 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.
Glenn Scott Wright, President of Victoria Miro, said, ‘I have long admired Shahzia Sikander’s work and have followed her exceptional career with interest. As rigorously intelligent as it is visually compelling, her wide-ranging practice operates on so many levels, reframing and reimagining our world in endlessly revelatory ways. I am delighted that she is joining the gallery at this exciting moment and look forward to being part of the next chapter of Shahzia’s extraordinary career.
Image: Portrait of Shahzia Sikander
Courtesy the artist, Sean Kelly and Victoria Miro
Photo © Landon Speers
