The ancient art of Indo-Persian miniature painting takes exacting technique. Some artists might find it confining, but Shahzia Sikander, who trained as a miniature painter at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, in the early 1990s, uses it as a launching pad. Her nuanced works on paper and in videos explore issues of power, colonialism, and geopolitical tensions.
In “Shahzia Sikander: The Exploding Company Man and Other Abstractions,’’ at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the artist deploys her miniature-painting techniques to conjure empires past, and to shake out assumptions about power structures that still exist. It’s deadly serious stuff, and yet the work is beautifully playful and often comic. The traveling show was organized by Hou Hanru of the San Francisco Art Institute.
The works on paper are breathtaking in their many breathy layers of ink. A shadowy figure stands in silhouette at the center of “Series of Transformations 3.’’ He’s armed to the teeth, with rifle butts and gunstocks poking from his head, feet, and back. These meld with a delicate pattern of feathery gestures that play over him and billow around him.
Maybe this is a hopeful piece, in which the beauty of the pattern overtakes the intimation of violence. At the same time, it wrestles with traditions of design and representation in Muslim and Hindu cultures. Islamic art is rich in elaborate pattern, but for religious reasons discourages figural representation. Hindu art delights in the figure, and in storytelling. Sikander’s work often manifests that conflict.
In 2001, the artist started using her drawings to make digital animations. “SpiNN’’ is an early one; the title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to CNN. Here, though, the news comes from Sikander’s cheeky juxtapositions.
It begins with small black forms swarming like locusts around a traditional hall of the Mughal Empire (circa the 16th to 19th centuries). The hall is represented in the style of miniature painting: flat and outfitted with intricate patterns in lush tones. Movement electrifies this visual feast. The black forms - hairdos, it turns out - settle on the heads of women. They cluster around a red horse ridden by the Hindu god Krishna. And they lounge about, taking over the halls of imperial power, casually subverting that power with their ease and femininity.
The show’s title refers to a character in Sikander’s 2010 video, “The Last Post.’’ The company man suspiciously resembles a beleaguered representative of economic and governmental clout who appears in some of William Kentridge’s films. In “The Last Post,’’ Sikander’s emblem of power wears an 18th-century British soldier’s red and white uniform. The “company’’ is the East India Company, the trading giant that dealt with China and the Indian subcontinent and that paved the way toward British rule in India.
Like the Krishna devotees in “SpiNN,’’ the portly company man appears in the halls of the Mughal Empire. The video is hypnotic in its pastiche of backdrops, moving from the minutely controlled delicacy of the Mughal hall to a punky, surreal landscape of spiky hills, to looming, textured painterly abstractions. The effect is kaleidoscopic, as dark inky gestures swoop over the redcoat and he explodes into a confetti of red and white shards.
It’s an extraordinary animation, all apparently made with still imagery that Sikander manipulates to rush and grow and rotate over the screen, interchanging pattern and metaphorical imagery with the redcoat - who is a central figure, but does not come across as the protagonist. He is a stand-in for rigid structure, and in Sikander’s shifting and expanding universe, he will not hold.
He appears again in “Confrontation,’’ a 2011 drawing in which those shards circle him and a shadowy horn player, whose blowing appears to summon both chaos and pattern around the duo.
Recently, the artist has also begun to make live-action videos. These can’t possibly convey history’s dance of veils and the gyrations of power with the same eloquence as “The Last Post.’’
“Gossamer’’ stars Du Yun, a Shanghai-born, New York-based musician, playing two figures: a garish American girl in a Popeye T-shirt and tutu, and a more restrained Asian woman in a silken red and black outfit. They appear individually and also on a split screen, and the girl seems to beg the woman for attention. The clash of cultures in “Gossamer’’ fits Sikander’s themes, but the video is the glibbest work in the show.
“Bending the Barrels’’ has more weight. Sikander uses footage of the pomp and decorum of Pakistani military bands - courtly spectacle familiar from miniature painting. As the bands play their British marches or puff into their mournful bagpipes, she superimposes text derived from authoritative military pronouncements over the marching bands: “The armed forces have made every effort not to be harsh.’’
The result is strangely poignant - we see the musicians caught up in the impositions of history. Having integrated British military styles, they still act at the whim of the powerful. Sikander’s generous scope enables us to see the musicians as figures influenced by waves of cultural history, and she reminds us that those waves keep crashing down upon us all.
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com.