Overview
The Cincinnati Art Museum presents Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, a career-spanning exhibition of the internationally renowned, New York-based artist. For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander has been reframing South Asian visual histories through a contemporary feminist perspective. Working in a variety of mediums—painting, drawing, print, digital animation, mosaic, sculpture, and glass—Sikander reimagines the past for our present moment. Throughout her practice, she considers diasporic experiences, histories of colonialism, and Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics.
Rather than proceeding chronologically, Collective Behavior follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries throughout her work, rooted as they are in a recurring lexicon of forms, figures, and ideas. The exhibition explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and—perhaps most significantly—as a global citizen engaging with a disrupted historical narrative.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, co-organised by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. After Venice, complementary iterations of the exhibition open across Ohio (the iteration at Cleveland Museum of Art runs from from 14 February–8 June 2025). CAM’s iteration of Collective Behavior is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Sikander’s remarkable career.
Installation images: Photographer Phil Armstrong
