Shahzia Sikander, artist

This project’s collaborators, Shahzia Sikander and Ayad Akhtar, are each portrayed here in two prints. Sikander’s precisely etched portraits are overlaid with more freely drawn images inspired by Indo-Persian illuminated manuscripts, with the prints’ borders referencing album pages. Akhtar’s accompanying text laments how a Muslim working in the West “operates denied any shared sense of the central animating narratives of her own raciospiritual tradition.” He goes on to tell of the prophet
Muhammad’s night journey, in which he “travels to the sacred mosque at the furthest sanctuary, and thence upward to heaven. . . . The Prophet returns heightened and enlarged and embolded to speak on behalf of creation.” The resulting work honors Sikander and Akhtar’s “own long, winding, yearning journeys into the life-giving, life-defining mysteries of creative revelation.”