SHAHZIA SIKANDER: There's something about the process,
the miniature process of painting in this scale, primarily,
which keeps it in control.
I'm basically staining the paper
and it has to be a very even stain.
It's slow. and you have to keep the edge
of the tea really, sort of, always in flow
so that you just drip the whole edge down steadily.
It's very meditative,
and there's a sense of familiarity
because a lot of years have gone in here.
(scraping)
One thing I've learned is respect for tradition
and respect for patience,
because you just cannot achieve anything,
like you can't achieve a painting if you don't...
Like you need time. Time is the key.
So I can't, like, do a show
and prepare a body of work in a year.
I need three to four years.
(bells ringing)
Miniature painting, you know,
comes out of book illustration, manuscript, painting.
It's an old art form.
All the strange piled up, stacked up perspective,
interior spaces and then suggestions of windows and doors,
which suggest the outside world or the spiritual world,
or some notion of perfection.
That kind of jewel-like, translucency that comes through
is only because you have a discipline behind it.
It takes many, many layers,
at least like 10 to 20 layers of different color,
to build it up.
And you have to be very careful,
because if your brush is loaded with too much water,
you lift off the earlier layers of pigment also,
'Cause they're not sealed.
So, it's practice.
Sometimes, like when I'm not in practice,
all the 10 years of experience doesn't mean a thing.
But when we were studying in school in Pakistan,
my teacher used to have us sit on the floor on white sheets
and you get to leave your shoes outside.
And everything was very precise and very clean
and very minimum.
And you worked on your work and you did eye exercises.
You kept your work at least a foot away from your eyes.
And it was very methodical.
it had a very sort of...
It was very ritualistic also.
(Bells ringing)
I feel like acquiring a miniature painting early on...
For me, it was painting.
I was looking and understanding
the formal sensibility of painting,
except I was not painting on canvas.
And I was painting on paper
with a particular set of material,
but it was all about surface, palette, form,
composition, stylization.
And self-expression came later.
(bells ringing)
A lot of my work is deeply personal
and is drawn out of memory.
If you look at this particular border,
it's called riding the written and here the text becomes
more like horses or there's a suggestion of movement.
And that aspect is my experience of reading the Quran,
where I would read it with no particular understanding
because I was a child and I could read Arabic,
but I couldn't understand it.
And the memory of it is this amazing visual memory
where the beauty of the written word
supersedes everything else.
The meaning is there, but it's not just the meaning.
It's the ability of the written text to take you to that
other level.
(bells ringing)
My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting
was to break the tradition, to experiment with it,
to find new ways of making meaning
and to question the relevance of it.
(paper crinkling) The starting point in all my work,
whether it's small or it's large,
actually begins as simple drawings,
which are done on transparent tissue paper.
A lot of the images that exist in my work were happening
because I was interested
in subverting Hindu
with Muslim and Muslim with Hindu.
Having grown up as a Muslim in Pakistan,
I didn't have much information about Hindu mythology.
And when I came here,
I realized that these were the things
which still interested me.
And I was looking at the idea of the Hindu goddess,
but it didn't matter how many hands it had.
Just the notion that it was the female body
with several hands was important.
But the goddess has a very specific face.
And here I was dripping off the face and,
and putting, like, a headdress-like veil on top of it.
And yet the veil is on top of a Hindu goddess,
not to underestimate what's behind the veil.
The minute you bring the word veil into the equation,
it kind of connects you to a Muslim identity
or a woman's identity.
And these are very loaded issues to take on
because anything and everything associated with Islam
is either terrorism...
-: Um-Hm. ...or oppression for women.
Culturally, it's not, you know, my experience.
My grandparents, my parents, everybody was very,
very progressive, very supportive people.
My grandfather was very encouraging
towards careers for women, with everybody.
All the girls in the family.
They did something with their lives.
-: But then I was not keen.
If she's going to the National College of Arts,
then she might as well do architecture, which has scope.
You know? And like, you know, when she said fine arts,
one was a bit, you know...
At the most, you just hang a few paintings in the house,
whether you have a future or not.
(laughing) That was so rude.
-: So I was skeptical about that.
(forklift whirring)
-: This type of work for me
was, like, just the opposite
of the process of doing miniature painting.
(paper sliding)
This particular installation is much, much more spontaneous.
And it's always a challenge
because the decisions made are fast.
It involves my entire body.
It's like I'm working within the space and I'm up and down,
you know, the ladders and I'm like painting.
And then, everything kind of happens from start to end
within like four, five days.
So, there's a certain energy which comes out.
There is a certain sense of a little relief.
Where several drawings have been hung on top of each other,
there's no intention to hide anything.
Everything is very visible. The paper is transparent.
It floats, it moves.
The idea, you know, comes out of this whole relationship
to veiling and revealing.
I'm always taking photographs, doing sketches
or taking notes.
And then, I carry them wherever I go.
I brought so much stuff from Pakistan
and then so much stuff from Texas.
And then, every time I sit to do some work,
all of it is opened up.
For me, it's always like these divine circles.
You know, you go and you experience something
and then you come back right where you started.
When I'm working large and I paint and I do murals,
the next thing is always, I come back to miniature painting.
I can hate miniature for a while
because it's frustrating
because for all the different reasons
of doing something so labor intensive, you know,
which takes years to make.
So it's like always, "Why do I do this?"
And I let go and I do something else,
but I always come back to it.
And maybe because by the sheer act of doing it
is what gives me certain sort of...
you know, peace.
(soft piano music)