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Shahzia Sikander

Self-Rooted, 1994

Description

Maker

  • Shahzia Sikander, b.1969, Pakistani-American, (RISD MFA 1995, Painting & Printmaking)

Title

Self-Rooted

Year

1994

Medium

Ink and gouache on layered tracing paper

Dimensions

43.5 x 28.8 cm (17 1/8 x 11 5/16 inches)

Type

  • Works on Paper,
  • Drawings and Watercolors

Credit

Paula and Leonard Granoff Fund and Walter H. Kimball Fund

Object Number

2020.28

Projects & Publications

Publications

Shahzia Sikander

Extraordinary Realities

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Shahzia Sikander

November 12, 2021 - January 30, 2022

This double female representation exemplifies Sikander’s use of redrawing, reorienting, embellishing, and recontextualizing to arrive at new interpretations. Rendered here as a deity and its avatar, both with looping, “self-nourishing roots,” this image would become iconic in Sikander’s lexicon. The figures are presented in conversation with each other: one vertical, active, buoyant, and light; the other horizontal, passive, grounded, and dark. The liquidity of the ink on the slick paper created an unusual mottled pattern that resembles skin.

Self-Rooted is one of Sikander’s earliest works to employ layered tracing paper—note the vertical lines showing through from the sheet below. This strategy would soon become central to her practice.

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Self-Rooted with the accession number of 2020.28. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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