 Back to the future 2010 |
 Illustration I - Gad... 2008 |
 Illustration II - Ga... 2008 |
 Illustration III - G... 2008 |
 Jinnah to Zia 2010 |
 Roses are red 2010 |
 What we saw 2010 |
Artists Statement
Madiha Sikander’s work is primarily concerned with books. However, in her work Sikander successfully transforms the book into a visual space by dissolving the demarcation between image and word, texture and text. This makes the task of perception simultaneously sensory and cognitive, a process of meaning-making that is as much a part of the art work as the art work itself. Perception becomes laborious and consuming and thus akin to the backbreaking process of miniature painting. Parallel to this unifying process of meaning-making we find a process of unification at the conceptual level in which different ontological domains—the different categories of being—are fused into one.
What does the yellow rose signify? Is it the color of the sun, signifying warmth, joy, and friendship, as the yellow rose has come to signify? Or is it the color of jaundice and disease (complemented here by decay), as the yellow rose was historically understood to signify? But is it really about this, after all? Sikander challenges this and other possible interpretations by the choice of her medium and technique. She successfully uses miniature to situate the rose in a way in which it might well be interpreted as just an incidental occurring in the book—a rose pressed in a book merely for the sake of preservation. And this is precisely why the technique and the surface both become necessary and essential to this work.
It is in this way—challenging the apparent interpretation by painting the image as a chance occurrence—that Sikander necessitates the choice of her medium, and the use of books in all of her paintings. Try imagining the image in any other technique, or try visualizing it out of the book; and the work is destroyed—it is stripped off the possibility of interpretation as a chance occurrence and hence denuded of an important layer of meaning. It is this kind of perfection that is qualitatively required of an artist: the impossibility of other possibilities; and Sikander achieves that wonderfully well. In attaining the highest level of mimesis—the act of representation, she disturbs the boundaries of the real and the imitated, a fairly daring act, but another successful act of fusion.
Sikander’s work is an eclectic selection of existential concerns and everyday human experiences. It comes off as a living being with a life of its own. This person is not the painter herself; this is a character who can be, is, everyone. It is a being who is concerned with the fundamental questions about existence and the nature of reality on the one hand, while on the other she is unconcerned with anything corporeal or ethereal except the granting of a wish. She sees the ‘other’ of the society in a mirror, and urges us to use them. She reminds us of the parochial mirrors we use for introspection and hints at our insular attitudes towards the ‘other’ of our society. Whether it’s the otherised children of this society, the ‘Afghani Children hopeful of their future’ about to be razed by the coming times, or a burnt city, this being sees everything from a Child’s Eye View. She is concerned with the history of a nation while she’s interpreting psalms of life at the same time. She’s flying a politically loaded plane while she is venturing in the purely aesthetic field of an empty page. She is a complex being. And in her complex being Sikander intervenes as a successful artist to give her angsts and concerns an aesthetic resolution, while giving us new angles and ways to look at them.
