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[Shahzia Sikander: "The Last Post"]

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[layered sounds of music samples, static, and distortion]

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I tend to look into cultural and political boundaries

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and explore, you know, ideas in those boundaries.

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Sometimes it's more obvious, sometimes it's less.

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Sometimes it's more abstract, and sometimes it's far more illustrative of a political idea or thought.

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"The Last Post" plays on the sort of oscillating colonial trade relations

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between China and the East India Company at that time, over opium.

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I started looking at the East India Company and at the company man,

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became like the protagonist who travels throughout India,

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and then ventures into China.

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In this work, it is also referring to the end of the Anglo-Saxon hegemony over China,

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and there is a moment in the animation

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where the symbolic figure of the East India Company man sort of explodes.

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[distorted explosion sound plays]

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There are moments, I think, in the animation that embody some of these concepts,

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but it's not necessarily a linear narrative about this whole opium trade.

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Animations were quite a natural outcome to my process

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because I work in drawing primarily, and a lot of the drawings

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play with the idea of narrative, and movement was just a natural outcome.

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A lot of the murals that I did, a lot of the wall installations, were fairly large, and built in layers,

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and that also was very similar to how a lot of the animation work was constructed,

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which was in Photoshop, in layers.

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[woman singing softly]

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So I'm interested in taking a form, breaking it apart, and then rebuilding it.

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It is about transformation for me,

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whether it is the transformation of the image or a mark or a symbol.

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Or if it's the transformation of a genre or transformation of a medium.

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But it is a very core notion that I think stabilizes my practice.