Shahzia Sikander: Reckoning

Every midnight in September, a cyclical struggle unfolds across the screens of Times Square. Imagined as a restaging of a fictional Indo-Persian-Turkish miniature painting, Shahzia Sikander’s Reckoning depicts a dramatic choreography of floating warrior-like figures entangled in joust amidst an abstract, unraveling landscape. Reckoning draws upon themes of creation, conflict, and connection, mirroring the universal tensions that exist within broader global relationships, such as between migrant and citizen, woman and power, human and nature.

An intricate animation made from multiple layered drawings, Reckoning was created in 2020 and featured as a digital component of Sikander’s recent public art project Havah … to breathe, air, life commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy and on view in Madison Square Park and the nearby Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. The multi-site project was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy and Public Art of the University of Houston System, where it will be restaged in the fall of 2023.

September’s Midnight Moment is presented in partnership with Sean Kelly and The Armory Show as a part of Armory Off-Site, the fair’s outdoor art program featuring large-scale artworks across New York City’s parks and public spaces. Sikander’s work will also be on view in the Platform section of The Armory Show, curated by Eva Respini, which will feature large-scale installations and site-specific works that reexamine historical narratives.

The animation for Reckoning is by Patrick O’Rourke and an original score was created by Du Yun, both long-time collaborators of Sikander. The work marks Sikander’s second Midnight Moment, the first being Gopi-Contagion presented in October of 2015.

ABOUT SHAHZIA SIKANDER
Shahzia Sikander is a MacArthur prize-winning Pakistani-American visual artist working across a variety of mediums, including painting, animation, sculpture, mosaic and installation. She is widely celebrated for pioneering a contemporary interest in Central and South-Asian manuscript painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Sikander’s work since the mid-1990s has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South-Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition. Focusing on colonial and imperial archives, trade, empire and migration, Sikander’s practice takes a feminist perspective to expand narrow definitions around gender, sexuality, racial narratives and colonial histories.

Sikander received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, has exhibited internationally and her work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She serves on the boards of Art21, RISD and IFA/NYU.

Live Musical Performance by Du Yun, Zeb Bangash and Eddy Kwon
Thursday, September 28, 11:30pm–12am | Broadway between 45th St and 46th St

On Thursday, September 28, join us for a free, open-air musical performance to accompany Sikander’s Midnight Moment, featuring Pulitzer Prize winning composer Du Yun, vocalist Zeb Bangash, and interdisciplinary artist eddy kwon.