You may not be familiar with the concept of vimāna, but they are mythological flying palaces or chariots described in Hindu and Jain texts and Sanskrit epics. Literally translated the Sanskrit word vimāna means "measuring out". The Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander has referenced these flying palaces in a new Artspace edition, Her-Vimana, 2025.
This 8-color lithograph with marbleized Chine-collé on Kitakata paper print coincides with Sikander’s solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, both opening on February 14th. The shows follow the premiere of the artist’s major survey exhibition, Collective Behavior, at La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.
The new lithograph exemplifies Sikander’s mastery of layered storytelling and vibrant imagery. The work bursts with energy in a fusion of bold hues of red, yellow, blue, and earthy tones. Intricate details and flowing forms evoke themes of transformation, movement, and resilience, all of which are central elements of Sikander’s visual language.
The print measures 15.5 x 15.5 inches (39.37 x 39.37 cm) and is signed, numbered, and dated by the artist on the front. It is an edition of 40 and costs $1,500. Each print is accompanied by a copy of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, a definitive and richly illustrated monograph on the artist, published by Monacelli.
Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Engaging ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, her paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories.
“I aspire for multivalence. I aim to create something wondrous that inspires many possible associations, invites profound reflection, and generates difference,” she tells Artspace.
A pioneer in reinterpreting South Asian material histories through a feminist lens, Sikander has been a transformative voice in contemporary art for decades. Her multi-media practice consistently challenges Eurocentric art histories and spans painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works including Havah...to breathe, air, life, recently installed in Madison Square Park, New York.
Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others. Proceeds from the sale of Her-Vimana, 2025 will support the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. On the eve of her two shows in Cincinnati and Cleveland, we asked her about Her-Vimana, 2025 and how it relates to her wider practice.
SHAHZIA SIKANDER - Her-Vimana, 2025
Photography Garrett Carroll
Vimāna are mythological flying palaces or chariots described in Hindu and Sanskrit texts. They have appeared across traditional and modern culture, but what do they mean to you personally? My interest in general in myth is in its function as an interpretive lens or a vehicle that carries a narrative over time. Flight and movement are associated in the mythic nature of storytelling and flight is a recurrent concept in my practice, especially its equation with imagination, buoyancy, ascendency, growth and change – all attributes that are in abundance around women-centered stories in my work.
Her-Vimana, 2025 showcases the feminine self-rooted form as an outlier, in red, mounted on birds, clouds, nature, abstract forms. She is in motion, moving in time and space. The movement and morphing are about embracing flux and uncertainty, and an inner turmoil as a defining feature of the creative spirit.
The subject matter here is an archetypal idea for the resilience of women who carry their roots wherever they go. The primary medium is lithograph and drawing. Drawing implies movement in time and across formats and mediums. It’s a means of imagining and bringing forms to life. Lace was used in this work to conceptualize a pattern. Lace holds significance to me. It is threaded, broken apart, and rebuilt and carries the weight of the feminine whether as a textile of childhood or memories of grandmothers.
Your color palette is symbolic as well as striking. How do you decide on colors, and what meanings do they carry in your work? Use of color is often intuitive and context dependent. For example, the patina for ‘Promiscuous Intimacies’ and ‘NOW’, both sculptures in bronze, was intentionally in hues of red and ochres to highlight that classical painted statuary was polychromatic and not necessarily ‘lily white’ as often constructed over time in popular imagination. ‘Color prejudice’, as historian Sarah Bond points out, ‘is how we color or fail to color classical antiquity, which is often a result of our own cultural values’. For me, connecting the patina to larger discussions on color in classical sculpture further links the issue of classicism with American monuments and memorials, that are often revered as symbols of patriotism in their classicism aesthetic.
Shahzia Sikander with Her-Vimana, 2025 - photography Nir Arieli
Many of your works incorporate movement, whether through swirling forms or digital animation. What draws you to this idea of fluidity? I work primarily in ink and gouache for my drawings and animation. Ink defies control and creates tension between control and surrender which becomes generative in forms and images born out of the tension of material and gesture. Kinetic forms in drawing as well as animation can echo or transport cyclical themes of struggle, whether illustrating the flux between figuration and abstraction, water and pulp, hand and digital, human and nature or women and power.
Tell us a little about your process. My artistic process starts with reading and research, engagement with community, and careful listening. Working across media, I often cull stories that center women; what is women’s sense of self versus someone else’s idea of us? I love digging for such societal shifts in the works of women writers, whether it’s bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Fahmida Riaz or Solmaz Sharif.
I have spoken about my interest in radical feminist poets such as Audre Lorde, Angela Carter, Maya Angelou, Ismat Chughtai, Rebecca Solnit, Wisława Szymborska, Claudia Rankine, Robin Coste Lewis, Parveen Shakir and so many more. Such thinkers assist in new ways of thinking, reframing history and imagining new possibilities as part of the broader processes of transformation in a society and they offer counter-perspectives to our prevalent hyper-masculinized histories and ways of being. Their words reside in me, feed me, that is where I draw inspiration from.
By centring women as symbols of resistance and transformation within vast global histories of Empire I not only think about being subversive but about redemptive possibilities as a counternarrative to the exploitative and extractive ways of thinking.
SHAHZIA SIKANDER - Her-Vimana, 2025
Photography Garrett Carroll
What role does spirituality or mythology play in your art, and how does it intersect with your views on humanity? How does art become mythic in nature? What creates that transformation, time, reception, and inherent sublimity? These are lucid ideas to have in one’s head when thinking of creating protagonists that are allegorical or symbolic. I love expanding a repertoire of feminine characters born from reflection on women’s connections through memory, stories, collective consciousness.
How can an artist summon the ‘duende’ from ink, song, hymn, chants, utterances, dialogue, ancient forms from multiple histories, like the Indus Vallery, Buddhist, Cambodian, Mesopotamian, Chola, Sumerian, Native American, Nigerian, Petra, vast multiple female pantheons and so forth…that can represent the spectrum of human emotions and attributes, and traverse time and space to connect to present day erasure, narrow representation, and truncated histories of war and violence.
Your work spans miniature painting, large-scale painting, digital animation and sculpture. How do these different mediums inform each other? There is not one way to tell a story. Neither is there just one story. If the story is changing, developing, growing and demands respect for its unpredictability, then the medium must respond accordingly.
I think of art as a language, a tool, a means to communicate. At its heart is a pursuit and fruition of an idea. Ideas can take shape in multiple forms. I am a research driven artist and need to move in many unanticipated directions.
I see my use of drawing as writing, where fiction meets non, prose meets poetry, and is cross bordered, and cross cultural. The beating heart is drawing that carries the DNA of manuscript painting. My work continually seeks to reorient and reimagine these traditions. Claiming my place in proximity to my cultural heritage, which has been dispersed for years due to colonial legacy, is a form of reconfiguring boundaries. I have learned that tradition is not static and the discourse benefits from fresh perspectives.
My practice has always been about challenging and expanding these frameworks, whether the drawing becomes a libretto for an animation, or the pixel offers a bridge for mosaics. The connecting tissue remains the urgency of drawing invoking its multi-valence.
SHAHZIA SIKANDER - Her-Vimana, 2025
Shahzia Sikander with Her-Vimana, 2025 - photography Nir Arieli
What initially drew you to the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting, and how did you begin experimenting with it? My interest in pre-modern manuscripts was sparked in the mid-1980s when abstract expressionism was prevalent, and I wanted to go against that trend to focus on craft and narrow the extreme distinctions between high and low art.
Another reason that medieval and pre-modern Central and South Asian manuscripts spoke to me was because of a general dismissive attitude in Western art history towards non-western visual languages as intellectually inferior. I became more curious to learn about pictorial vernacular that did not have an easy relationship with the western painting canon.
Premodern Central and South Asian manuscript traditions are vast and varied in their iconographies, form, subject matter and style, though they can loosely be defined within the traditions of book art and Illumination. My thesis work at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan looked at the traditions and responded with a singular work titled ‘The Scroll’ (1989-90) that took 1-2 years to make. At 5 feet and 13 inches it was small and yet a large ‘miniature’ and emerged as the tipping point, laying to rest the national debate about miniature’s inability to engage the youth.
The Scroll received national critical acclaim in Pakistan and brought international recognition to the medium in contemporary art practices in the 1990s, launching what is now called the Neo-Miniature movement.
It depicts a female protagonist in a domestic environment defying bodily restrictions by becoming an elastic, transparent, moving, morphing ghost-like form. The claiming of the freedom of the body is one of the defining emotions in the Scroll. The Scroll remains relevant in multiple ways because it deals with ideas that are timeless and abstract about the restlessness of youth. The ideas would be more thematic in the historical manuscript.
While developing The Scroll, I studied the analytical framing devices of Timurid miniatures, the borders and marginalia of Mughal painting, the tradition of Chinese scrolls and the writings of many feminist poets. There were lots of visits to local architectural sites, both historical and contemporary and I also studied narrative techniques and staged motions in films by Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa.
How do you balance the meticulous discipline of traditional miniature painting with the innovations that define your contemporary practice? It is innate. The meticulous discipline learned over years of training is intrinsic to all work and projects. Sometimes the collaboration with other artists, composers, poets require even more focus, time and discipline!
I would say that the balance is achieved through an innovative approach that considers the material history and infrastructural contexts of training and apprenticeship through which South Asian art and aesthetics have typically approached the study of traditional manuscript painting and its various forms.
Folios and manuscripts are often hiding out of sight in Western Museum storages or in private collections yet to be published. Collectors over the years continued to cannibalize original historical manuscripts, cutting out and dispersing these paintings across the world for profit and diminishing the potency and wholeness of these illustrated worlds. It means that when I’m researching the archives and historical folios, I am aware that archives are full of gaps, and I can summon thinkers like Saidya Hartman and her "critical fabulation" concept of combining research, critical theory, and fiction to bridge gaps in colonial and orientalist narratives.
In a creative repurposing of the archive, assigning new meanings can offer alternative descriptions to trenchant and narrow ideas and representations. It is critical to examine the truncated traditions because of their colonial histories from multiple vantage points to expand the Eurocentric scholarship around the genre.
Shahzia Sikander with Her-Vimana, 2025 - photography Nir Arieli
How do you use layering—both physically in your paintings and conceptually in your themes—to build your complex visual narratives? Layering produces an intimacy of multiple temporalities. It’s both additive and subtractive. I build layers through physical papers in installations, and in animation, the structure of building up movement through accumulation of images is a natural direction.
Layers allow the overlapping of references and a multivalence of meaning. Layers can also be disturbed to create tensions across surfaces. Within a precisely controlled surface of an artwork, an unmediated spontaneous gesture can be read as the ‘disruption of a perfect state’ – ‘Disruption as Rapture’ the title of an animated film speaks to that moment or reinvigoration.
While studying the language of miniature painting, I simultaneously began experimenting with scale and material in the early to mid-’90s, creating large painted murals at times layered with drawings on transparent paper as a counterpoint to my detailed small, scaled painting practice. The intention was to use fluid, spontaneous gestures that involved the whole body and amplified invented motifs.
Everything is visible through the transparency of the paper, as it is built layer upon layer. The images and the scroll of thin paper flow and move. All marks, including any flaws, become a part of the piece. The physicality of layers in these bodies of work eventually led to using layers in the early animations made via aftereffects.
Your work is both personal and politically resonant. How do you navigate this balance between personal expression and broader social commentary? Almost everything about me, personally as well as politically—has been formed by being in and out of divides, political, emotional and gendered divides. I see my young self as being bookended by the fall of the Berlin wall and 9/11. In reality histories are multidimensional, and all cultures are dynamic. The continuity of art and knowledge construction is an anchor for me and my practice; how we reckon with our otherness in a shifting world, how we approximate, reproduce, and re-enact our culture and history.
Whatever we make, consume, and give back, it has resonance and consequence beyond our immediate lives. How we experience art, how we respond to it and how we interpret it is an open-ended premise. I like to believe that the function of art is to allow multiple meanings and possibilities, to open up space for a more just world.
Shahzia Sikander with Her-Vimana, 2025 - photography Nir Arieli
Miniature painting has historically been tied to power and patronage, gender and identity. How do you subvert those associations in your own work? I studied closely with master miniaturist Bashir Ahmed from 1987-1991. The significant attention and acclaim my work received led to immediate increased enrolment in the National College of Art’s miniature department - I was appointed to teach alongside the master miniature painter in 1992, the first woman and student to do so. Transforming miniature painting’s status from traditional and nostalgic to a contemporary idiom became my personal goal from early on.
This rich relationship I have built over 30 years with the genre of miniature painting is exemplified in my interdisciplinary practice, which includes teaching and collaboration around experience, consciousness, race, and culture. I work in multi-media, including film, sculpture and public art to put the medium of pre-modern manuscript painting in dialogue with other artistic forms like poetry, music, and dance.
South Asia has more than 200 hundred years of colonization. Many South Asian manuscripts were stolen, dismembered and sold for profit during colonial occupations. Many of these works live in storages in Western museums in Europe and America. My intent is to diversify the predominantly Eurocentric Art History by challenging orientalist narratives and championing South Asian artists and art practices like the neo-miniature.
Take a closer look at Her-Vimana, 2025 here. You can read more about The Cincinatti Art Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art on our partner page.The Cincinnati Art Museum features a diverse collection of over 73,000 works, spanning 6,000 years. The museum organizes several exhibitions each year and also hosts national and international traveling exhibitions. The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality of its collection, which includes more than 63,000 artworks over 6,000 years. The museum is an international forum for exhibitions and performing arts, and is a leader in digital innovation.
