A Politics of Refusal: Shahzia Sikander’s High Seas; Closed Skies

'I'm neither the loosening of song nor the close-drawn tent of music;
I'm the sound, simply, of my own breaking.'
- Adrienne Rich 'Ghazal XII' (1971)¹

Shahzia Sikander's complex visual practices have long shone a light on the global legacies of colonialism, patriarchy and Empire, 'lest we forget'². However, they also seek moments of ambiguity in the trans-cultural territories that she inhabits as a Pakistani-American artist. She works seamlessly with and across numerous cultural traditions in her multivalent, women-centred practice. Skilfully adept in the tradition of Indo-Persian manuscript painting, in which she trained in Lahore before becoming 'the first woman to teach the conceptual possibilities of miniature painting in Pakistan' after centuries of only male teachers, Sikander is most at home when her work transgresses visual traditions, rethinks rigid categorisations and turns them on their head.³ Hers is a politics of refusal. The works included in High Seas; Closed Skies, her first exhibition at Victoria Miro in London, range in techniques, including a panoramic video animation, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, 2026, a number of glass mosaics, and a series of animation-related gouache and ink works on paper. Gold leaf shimmers across many of the works, a nod to the tradition in which she trained and for which she is renowned, having not only resurrected the relevance of the form in and for the present day but also inspired a whole new generation of neo-miniaturist contemporary painters.⁴ Despite the variety of media in which Sikander works, and the seeming dissonance between the materials of her craft – ranging as they do from the solidity of glass tesserae for the mosaics, to the fluidity of ink and gouache for the works on paper, and the intangibility of the digital in her expansive video animations – the significance of drawing remains a central connecting thread. All of the work, no matter what form and material it eventually takes, begins with drawing. As Sikander has commented, 'drawing is like a lifeline ... it is really about channelling thinking ... the intimacy, the vulnerability of it is very important ... drawing allows subtleties, nuances. You can escape boundaries with drawing, it bleeds out, it goes in and then you can be subversive with it.'⁵ A good example of this can be seen in the small gouache and ink sketch of Queen Victoria, made as one of the units in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. The diminutive figure of the self-proclaimed Empress of India is rendered almost insignificant on the sea of white paper that surrounds her and yet in the animation, depending on the size of the screen, the same sketch has the potential to stay small or become vast; the miniature scale of the drawing is subverted and enabled to exceed its own boundedness from the page. The switch between the intimate craft of miniature painting and the transformation of the same iconography, floating and dissolving at different potential scales in the film, is unique to Sikander's rigorous application of her training, combined with her dazzling imagination and her push to constantly transgress categorisations and traditional boundaries.

‘All of the work, no matter what form and material it eventually takes, begins with drawing.’

– Dorothy Price

Whilst the drawings in the exhibition enable the viewer to focus on the individual visual motifs, or particles, before they are layered and seamlessly woven together for the animation, we can recognise an almost deliberate counter-practice in the mosaics. Sikander has always innovated with media and what is fascinating about her use of mosaic is how it inverts the dispersal of fragmentation encapsulated in the fluidity of the drawings and more particularly the animation. Yet at the same time, what is of interest to Sikander is the peculiar materiality of the glass tesserae from which her mosaics are built. As a medium, mosaic is solid yet also transparent and fragile, the pieces are easily shattered – a redolent metaphor for the histories of imperialism that she explores across and within her practice.

Rich in Ghazal
Rich in Ghazal, 2026, is an especially interesting mosaic work, a seeming outlier from the other mosaics in the exhibition: Parting Skies, 2026, which is more directly related to the works on paper and a specific freeze frame from 3 to 12 Nautical Miles; Possessed, 2026, an oval-framed cameo of Queen Victoria wearing colonial territories as jewellery, rendered in fragments but held together by her frame, also closely tied to the themes of Empire explored in the animation and the works on paper; and The Hour Glass, 2025, where two floating female figures face one another, their roots entwined above a lotus flower. All are recurrent motifs in Sikander's practice and emblematic of what Gayatri Gopinath has referred to as 'the aesthetic practices of the queer diaspora, in that the queer optic mobilised by the work emerges from a diasporic sensibility,' rootless, self-sufficient and refusing to be fixed or categorised.⁶ Rich in Ghazal continues a focus on feminist aesthetics but speaks to Sikander's wider interests in literary feminism in particular and the significance of ambiguity and the poetic richness that might be produced when different cultures intermingle and collide. The 'Rich' of the title refers to American poet Adrienne Rich, who both translated the Urdu ghazals of the nineteenth-century Mughal poet Mirza Ghalib (from which the epigraph to this essay is drawn) and, across the 1960s and 1970s, wrote her own original ghazal sequences in a form heavily influenced by the classical ghazal tradition: a short poem consisting of rhyming couplets, usually between five and fifteen. As Neda Alizadeh Kashani has commented, the deliberate ambiguity of the ghazal enabled Rich 'to create a hybrid or border-crossing poetic language'. As Kashani observes:

'This new mode of writing allowed her to speak of women and to connect gender issues to socio-political matters in her society. In other words, it created new spaces for her to connect the private to the public sphere, to speak of women on an equal level with men and to empower them. This poetic language not only went against patriarchal norms of writing, but against all forms of oppression by asking for equality and empowerment of all marginal groups.'⁷

Rich in Ghazal resonates with Sikander's own ways of thinking and working, from the position of women as boundary breakers, transgressors of oppressive regimes and categories in the search for freedom through rhizomatic networks of fluidity and ambiguity. Women in Sikander's practice are often positioned as queer agents of resistance, change, nurture and power. They become both literal and metaphorical touchstones, centred as symbols of endurance and transformation within vast global histories of Empire to local inflections of colonial dominance and ecological disaster. Whilst the multiple images of Queen Victoria in Sikander's mosaics, works on paper and animation serve as signifiers of Empire in the form of the ubiquitous monuments that were installed across the vast swathes of Britain's colonial territories during her reign, Adrienne Rich, whose mosaic face is scaffolded with red lines of Safavid architecture, seems poised here as a counterbalance to the violence of imperial histories of Victoria's reign.⁸

‘Watching Sikander’s film is truly a mesmerising experience … From the radiating shamza or sunburst at the beginning of the film, the combined visual and sonic experience of watching it unfold engenders the destabilising effects of the sublime.’

– Dorothy Price

3 to 12 Nautical Miles 
In the digital animation, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, Sikander weaves a sensuous visual tableau in which the motifs, particles and images captured by hand in the series of delicately painted watercolours, ink and gouache works on paper, are layered and accumulated across a nine-minute film that offers a visual and sonic meditation on vast swathes of imperial history, the cumulative violence which is refracted through the beauty of her visual poetics. Watching Sikander's film is truly a mesmerising experience, enhanced by the accompanying score composed by Sikander's long-term collaborator, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun. From the radiating shamza or sunburst at the beginning of the film, the combined visual and sonic experience of watching it unfold engenders the destabilising effects of the sublime. One feels giddy and light-headed in the palpably visceral experience of this work, a film that expands the limits of the fathomable and demands multiple viewings to capture even a breath of its capacious ambition. As curator Hou Hanru, who has worked closely with Sikander, has observed of her film-making practice, 'whether on a small piece of paper or an immense video screen' Sikander's artworks 'are like scenes of genesis. A whole world, with everything, every life we can imagine, is given birth from a tiny nucleus … a drop of ink at the centre … spinning, radiating.'⁹

The result of a commission, where it was originally displayed on the façade of Hong Kong's M+ museum, reaching out across the city's iconic harbour, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles activates aspects of historical memory in the present and invites its audience to contemplate the violent colonial histories of the British in modern China and contemporary Hong Kong. It is a poignant reminder of how the long arm of British imperialism and its trading interests in the East India Company continues to shape aspects of Hong Kong as a contemporary global city where, even so, Queen Victoria (a key protagonist as indicated earlier) still lends her name to its harbour. To fully appreciate the poignancy, beauty and tragedy encapsulated so poetically in Sikander's animation, it is worth dwelling for a moment on the history to which it alludes.

Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire¹⁰
From 1842 until 1997, Hong Kong had been a crown colony of Britain, directly as a result of China's defeat in the first Opium War of 1839-1842. The intense colonial trade in Indian-grown opium to China, in exchange for satisfying Britain's insatiable appetite for tea, had been set in motion under the Qing dynasty by the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century.¹¹ The company's forced importation of opium into China in exchange for tea wreaked havoc on the subsequent fate of the Chinese nation. This is not to say that China was not already an opium-consuming nation, but rather it was the East India Company's aggressive flooding of the market that caused the problems. By the 1830s, the Qing government attempted to ban the drug but made little headway against the successful trade in opium smuggling: nimble fleets of small boats, colloquially named 'fast crabs' and 'scrambling dragons' were able to dart in and out of coves and inlets along the coastline, thus evading capture. It was at this point that the government appointed superintendent Lin Zexu (1785-1850) as their opium tsar in Canton, northwest of modern Hong Kong. In Sikander's animation, Zexu's portrait appears on the table, alongside a sculpture of Queen Victoria based on the drawing discussed earlier and one that recalls all of the variations of the same colonial monument erected far and wide across the Empire, from British India and Pakistan, to Guyana, the wider Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and all of the global colonial outposts in between. Placed between Zexu and Queen Victoria is a composite portrait of any number of possible East India Company officials, many of whom subsequently became British politicians and prime ministers - early examples of the unsavoury alliance of party politics with trade and commerce under the guise of democracy. In Sikander's work, they are all connected through the motif of the poppy which, as she has remarked, 'starts to accumulate across the table … its capacity to bloom, dissolve and recur' allowing it 'to function as a temporal loop rather than a historical footnote.'¹² In Sikander's retelling, the poppies initiate the dissolution of the table and all of those enshrined upon it.

Zexu's failed attempts to halt the trade in opium – which included holding western merchants hostage and destroying millions of dollars' worth of the product – had disastrous consequences for China. The British went to war. The Qing dynasty's junks (flat-bottomed sailing boats) didn't stand a chance against the British Royal Navy's iron-built, steam-driven gunships, including the sinisterly named HMS Nemesis. With an imminent threat against the southern capital of Nanjing, the Qing regime had no choice but to seek terms for their surrender. Thus it was that the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing included a demand for reparation payments to be made to Britain in silver, increased foreign access to Chinese markets, the opening of four additional ports along the southeast China coast, a fixed trade tariff and – perhaps the most significant of all – the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, under whose control it remained until 1997, and full diplomatic recognition of Great Britain by the Qing Emperor, thus effectively ceding power to Queen Victoria. 

In a characteristically decolonial move, however, the 'critical fabulations'¹³ that enable history to be reimagined by the artistic imagination see the maritime defeat of China by the British as no longer inevitable. Sikander's radical proposition of resistance – her politics of refusal – is visualised via the multiplied motif of the sampan, 'a small Chinese locally operated boat that sustained everyday trade, fishing and transport', and that symbolised the 'informal labour and survival economies that exist beneath and alongside imperial trade narratives.'¹⁴ As Sikander observes:

'Unlike the grand vessels of empire, the sampan is scaleless and adaptive, slipping between regimes, borders, and historical epochs, exemplified in the animation by using the visual logic of the sampan as a single particle.'¹⁵

The single particle then accumulates, 'becoming countless in scale' across the animation. It activates resistance to the dominant historical narrative and recoups a form of agency for the everyday, re-imagining history from below.

In 3 to 12 Nautical Miles she calls particular attention to cartographies of empire in which maps signify as 'instruments of power … made explicit in the figure of Queen Victoria wearing a map of India and Hong Kong as a necklace', in which colonial 'extraction becomes adornment.'¹⁶ Today, Hong Kong remains a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, operating as a distinct territory with its own currency and legal system. Its maritime boundary consists of a 3-nautical mile (approx. 5.5 km) territorial sea limit within the Pearl River estuary and the South China Sea. Its waters are entirely surrounded by mainland China's twelve-nautical miles of territorial sea. The '3-to-12 nautical miles' of the work's title, then, hints at Hong Kong's continued position as a source of both freedom and tension in its role as the primary financial gateway between China and the rest of the world. As Sikander has noted:

'3 to 12 Nautical Miles refers to the incremental expansion of territorial waters, a legal recalibration of how sovereignty is imagined at sea. This shifting coastal zone is a site where national authority can be asserted, contested and enforced. It signals ideas of power, surveillance and access across maritime space.'

Hong Kong's three nautical miles of maritime territory is entirely circumscribed by China's twelve. The historical legacy of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing is made present as Sikander places Hong Kong at the centre of the work's conceptual and physical frame, neither a backdrop nor a case study, 'but a territorial threshold' in which ideas of maritime sovereignty are tested within the complex networks of geopolitical histories that are constantly reimagined through Sikander's extraordinary creative vision. The multiple intersections of power, extractive economies and colonial impulses that continue to structure the geopolitical worlds in which we all live today are exposed, challenged and disrupted by an artist who unceasingly helps us to see otherwise through the ambiguity, accumulation, multiplicity, excess, fragmentation and extraordinary rigour of her aesthetic and political vision.

Dorothy Price is Executive Dean and Deputy Director, and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld.

Text © Dorothy Price

1 Adrienne Rich ‘Ghazal XII’ in Aijaz Ahmad (ed.) Ghazals of Ghalib, Versions of the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad, W.S.Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt first published 1971, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.58.
2 I invoke this phrase from Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem ‘Recessional’ deliberately, because the irony of Kipling’s position – as an Indian-born British imperialist and the progenitor of this phrase as well as his notorious 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in which he exhorts the US to seize and take control of the Philippines – would not be lost on Sikander.
3 Shahzia Sikander, cited in Wendy Vogel (ed.), Convening with Shahzia Sikander, California: Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 2025, p. 33.
4 For more on this see Jason Rosenfeld, Shahzia Sikander, London: Lund Humphries, 2025, p.11.
5 Shahzia Sikander in conversation with Dorothy Price on site at Victoria Miro, 5 June 2026.
6 Gayatri Gopinath ‘Promiscuous Intimacies: Embodiment, Desire and Diasporic Dislocation in the Art of Shahzia Sikander’ in Sadia Abbas and Jan Howard (eds.) Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, Providence: RISD Museum and Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2020, p. 119. The design of The Hour Glass, 2025, is based on a stencilled and sprayed pigment work on handmade paper, Migrant Love made by Sikander in 2024, which Jason Rosenfeld has described as ‘an optimistic image of international and cross-border connection in a moment of exacerbated xenophobia in the midst of a political debate in America and elsewhere over purported border crises’. See Jason Rosenfeld, Shahzia Sikander, London: Lund Humphries, 2025, p. 130.
7 Neda Alizadeh Kashani, ‘Adrienne Rich’s Ghazals and the Persian Poetic Tradition: A Study of Ambiguity and the Quest for a Common Language’. Doctoral Thesis submitted to the Università degli Studi di Macerata, Italy, 2014, p. 7.
8 With thanks to Haani Jetha, Sikander’s studio director for alerting me to the Safavid architectural motifs in Rich in Ghazal.
9 Hou Hanru ‘Beyond What Words Can Tell. On Shahzia Sikander’s work’ in Hou Hanru and Anne Palpoli (eds.) Shahzia Sikander. Ecstasy as Sublime Heart as Vector, Italy, MAXXI, 2016, p. 51.
10 I borrow my subtitle in homage to Amitav Ghosh’s sweeping Ibis trilogy, set on board a former slave vessel The Ibis, repurposed to transport opium and indentured labourers across the Indian Ocean during the 1830s and 1840s in the lead up to the First Opium War. Each title in the series was published sequentially, Sea of Poppies in 2008; River of Smoke, 2011; and Flood of Fire, 2015. To my mind, the richness of Ghosh’s titles evokes thematic resonances with Sikander’s film.
11 Sujit Sivasundaram ‘The Opium Wars as End Point’ in Waves Across the South (London: William Collins, 2020), pp.238-241. 12 Shahzia Sikander, written notes shared with the author, May 2026.
12 Shahzia Sikander, written notes shared with the author, May 2026.
13 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, in Small Axe, Number 26 (Volume 12, Number 2): Duke University Press, June 2008, pp. 1–14.
14–16 Shahzia Sikander, written notes shared with the author, May 2026.