Despite the Storm, Sikander’s Witness Stands Tall
- By Amal Zaman
Photograph of Witness. Courtesy of the Author.
“What's the problem of women? Knowledge! What's the problem of women? Their head, that's why they want to cut their head.”
—Nawal El Saadawi
In the early morning of July 8, as Hurricane Beryl cast the coast of Texas in darkness and disarray, a statue was beheaded on the University of Houston campus. This statue—a feminine figure commissioned from globally renowned artist Shahzia Sikander—had become the focal point of a campaign by the Christian anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life. In February 2024, this group, long active in the crusade against reproductive justice, had been instrumental in convincing the university to cancel the opening celebration and artist’s talk.
The statue in question was first displayed to the public in early 2023 in New York’s Flatiron district. Titled Witness, the eighteen-foot sculpture stood tall in Madison Square Park. A golden figure hovered a few feet above the ground, both caged and attached to the ground by metal crinoline–a stiff frame which traditionally gives structure and volume to skirts worn over it. On the sculpture, however, this frame was covered by mosaic letters rather than fabric, spelling out the three letters from Arabic script of the word “havah”—a word colloquially used in spoken Urdu to denote wind and air. In the Islamic tradition, the word’s Arabic roots are associated with the wife of Adam.
Photograph of Witness. Courtesy of the Author.
Sikander’s figure itself is a human-like form with twisting roots in place of arms and legs, a head with two braids spiraling out like horns, a lace collar, and subtly pronounced hips and breasts. In Sikander’s early paintings, where the first few iterations of this figure appeared, these last two features were far more exaggerated. From NYC, the sculpture traveled to Houston—an important site in Sikander’s artistic career. She had been an artist in the Core Residency Program at the MFAH Glassell School of Art from 1995 to 1997 and worked with Project Row Houses, an empowering public art platform in Houston’s third ward.
On February 1, 2023, the conservative Christian editorialist Ross Douthat, wrote a NYT column that aimed to create a sense of fear around the sculpture, later picked up and amplified by right-wing outlets. I could pause here to tell a story here about collusion between the global right, and specifically between the Pakistani and American right, that has emboldened local actors to wrench back the political power that gender minorities have been fighting for fiercely, thereby concentrating it further in the hands of patriarchal actors and benefitting the larger forces of capitalist neo-imperialism. These are the larger currents that such acts of vandalism represent.
Instead, I’d like to explain why the shock I felt upon reading the news was not in response to the censorial domination the act expressed; this I have become used to. On the contrary, I felt the eerie sense of a chronicle foretold. Sikander had herself augured the figure’s headlessness. The vandals have only restored it to its original iteration and thus made manifest the very sort of violence Sikander herself has been focused on over the last three decades.
As part of my research over the last few years, I have been making my way through Shahzia Sikander’s oeuvre as a key example of how South Asian artists and writers have been reframing cultural history through feminine figures. In tracing how Sikander developed this figure during the nineties, I’ve spent time with versions of this form: they mutate and reshape themselves, show up in unexpected places, and travel through different mediums, contexts, and compositions. Sikander’s work is intricate, and each piece rewards a curious observer with their dense, overlapping iconographies and critical insight.
One sketch in particular—which I call either the “Slight and Pleasing Dislocation” figure (SPDF) or the “self-rooted figure,” as Sikander herself sometimes calls it—has had a hold on me. This work, first created while she was at RISD, is somewhere between plant and human. It has roots for arms and legs, exaggerated hips and breasts, and no genitalia. These features are very much like the “Witness” sculpture, except for a single aspect that clearly differentiated the two—but now unites them. SPDF is a headless figure.
A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, 1993. Courtesy of the artist, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Sikander’s work creolizes constantly, which makes it incredibly compelling; she puts the traditions that she encounters—and their historical erasures—into conversation. For the many strains of nationalisms that circulate in many artistic and cultural productions that have their roots in the subcontinent, and for analogous tendencies here in the US, such work is understandably anathema. Minority nationalisms tend to reproduce harsh identitarian boundaries that prevent and police coalitional thought. Yet for the same reason, Sikander’s work has become a magnet for those who yearn for cultural productions that defy such dictates, and for those who wish to maintain political and historical erasures.
Such forces often work through silencing that is effective because it is so difficult to name: the quiet exclusion of artists like Sikander from anthologies and histories, such as Iftikhar Dadi and Virginia Whiles’ book on modern Pakistani art, a failure to include her in exhibitions, or Quddus Mirza’s outright denouncment of her as not a “Pakistani artist.” She documents and reverses historical erasures and, in response, they begin to be enacted upon her work as well: I have to wonder why this MacArthur Genius has rarely if ever been able to exhibit in her home country, why her work was taught to me in New York, but never in Karachi, why Salman Toor—whose work I adore, no shade here—has had solo shows at the Whitney in New York and at Canvas Gallery in Karachi, but the same is not true for a woman whose paintings galvanized the reworking of the entire manuscript tradition, an Islamicate and Asian tradition repeatedly scavenged and exploited by the Euro-American Orientalists and neo-Orientalists in the art industry—and now also reframed in the service of Pakistani nationalisms.
These are omissions one can only speculate about—hence their power. But Sikander makes them tangible. The headlessness of the original figure served as a concrete symbol of the archival gaps and epistemolgical erasures enacted on feminine figures historically. Similarly, Sikander often obscures or effaces the faces of painted female figures when she does paint them. This is not about individual women, such gestures tell us—this is about historical forces that have been and will continue to be resisted. Sikander’s job is making them visible.
Moreover, the vandals have only succeeded in reminding us why in the hands of an artist like Sikander, abstraction can be both a potent refuge for feminist politics and liberatory. Sikander presents traditionally Islamic epistemologies as having as much potential to be liberatory, decolonial, and feminist as they are subjugating and patriarchal–and she does it through figuration that foregrounds rather than hides the sexuality of women and feminine beings. This narrative is dangerous globally because it destabilizes versions of Islamic thought that the militaristic capitalist industry invests in and uses to agitate right-wing groups.
Ready to Leave, 1996. Courtesy of the artist, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
In the early aughts, Sikander was commissioned to make a piece for a New York law firm. When the events of 9/11 took place, she was working on a fifty-foot mural. Regrettably, if not surprisingly, the firm's attitude towards and treatment of Sikander and the work shifted, and she was forced to withdraw from the commission. This incident was perhaps the most tangible prelude to the ire recently reawakened by her public sculpture.
A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II, 1999. Courtesy of the artist, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
My own reading of her more recent work, and the ways in which it has been filtered through institutions, presented to various audiences, is that sometimes its valences and iconography are tamped down, so that it may seem less political and more palatable to liberal viewers—an act of survival, to avoid censure. When I first saw it, this is what the head attached to the root-bearing figure signified to me. Of course, the subversive undercurrents persisted, despite these measures, as if the intense charge of the original, headless root-bearing figure exuded nonetheless. In my reading, the headlessness of the original figure serves as an emblem of the archival gaps and epistemolgical erasures historically enacted on liberatory feminine figures. The attack on the statue brings to the surface in a visceral way that a feminine head attached to a disruptive feminine body in the center of the public sphere remains a political target—because it demands a redistribution of power. Both the art and the violence against it make this mandate visible, nameable, and imaginable, and both will inspire continued struggle, as great works of art always do.
Not surprisingly, disinformation has already begun to spread, and suggestions have been made that the winds of Hurricane Beryl—rather than vandals acting out the sort of thinking that fuels anti-abortion activism—beheaded the figure. This is, of course, false, as University statements have already confirmed, yet the University of Houston has not released surveillance footage that shows the act of defacement, perhaps in order to protect themselves legally, but thus shielding the vandals as well. Sikander has made clear that, while she will continue to work prolifically, she will not be replacing the figure’s head.
In other words, her Witness will continue to stay rooted to itself and stand tall.
Amal Zaman is a writer, educator, organizer, and PhD candidate based in New York. She was raised in Karachi and Rawalpindi.
