CLEVELAND, OH.- The Cleveland Museum of Art announced that its presentation of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior opened on February 14, 2025. The exhibition premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM), it was a Collateral Event in association with the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. After Collective Behavior closed in Venice, iterations of the show traveled to both Ohio institutions, where they are on view concurrently.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, published by Monacelli, featuring scholarly and poetic responses to Sikander’s work by contributors including Manan Ahmed, Aruna D’Souza, Bhanu Kapil, Rosalind C. Morris, Fred Moten, and Victoria Sung.
The CMA presents Shahzia Sikander’s art in relation to historical South Asian works from the museum’s collection that inspire her. Collective Behavior includes works that span Sikander’s career and the many mediums that she has used. It comprises a series of conversations between our own time and the past that illuminate the artist’s primary ideas and inquiries. This iteration of Collective Behavior offers a narrative that the CMA is uniquely well suited to share, carrying forward in time the rich histories that are encompassed in the museum’s renowned South Asian collection. Simultaneously, it situates contemporary artistic practice in relation to the global history that precedes it.
For more than three decades, Sikander (born 1969, Pakistan) has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for the present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums, Sikander considers Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that make visible marginalized subjects. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States.
“Shahzia Sikander’s work looks back to our histories and forward to our futures,” said Emily Liebert, Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary art at the CMA. “Through this expansive perspective, she proposes new and deeply relevant narratives that cross time and place, helping us to see with fresh eyes the world we inhabit.”
Collective Behavior is cocurated by Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Liebert at the CMA.
Born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander earned her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, where she received rigorous training from master miniaturist Bashir Ahmad. She became the first woman to teach in the Miniature Painting Department at NCA, alongside Ahmad, and was the first artist from the department to challenge the medium’s technical and aesthetic framework. Sikander’s breakthrough work The Scroll (1989–90) received national critical acclaim in Pakistan, winning the prestigious Shakir Ali Award, the NCA’s highest merit award, and the Haji Sharif award for excellence. The artist moved to the United States to pursue an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1993 to 1995; from 1995 to 1997, she participated in the CORE Program of the Glassell School of Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Sikander moved to New York in the late 1990s and further developed her interest in deconstructing miniature paintings as well as questioning identity: what it means to not only be a practicing artist in the United States, but also Muslim, Pakistani, and female. Since 2001, Sikander has been creating digital animations, often on a monumental scale, alongside works on paper, murals, and installations. She has continued to experiment across media in recent years, creating sculpture as well as work in painted glass and mosaic.
She has been exhibited widely since the mid-1990s, with major solo exhibitions at Madison Square Park, New York (2023); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2022); the RISD Museum, Providence (2021–22); the Morgan Library, New York (2021); the Asia Society Hong Kong (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999); the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (1998); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998), among others. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Sikander is the recipient of the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2023); Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize (2022); KB17 Karachi Biennale Shahneela and Farhan Faruqui Popular Choice Art Prize (2017); Inaugural Medal of Art, US Department of State (AIE), Washington DC (2012); and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius” Award (2006), among many others. She is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery.
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