Shahzia Sikander

#Promiscuous Intimacies

NEW YORK CITY, USA

Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s exhibition “Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues” was held at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City in November 2020.

Featured within the exhibition was Sikander’s first bronze sculpture Promiscuous Intimacies. Based on the Goddess of Bronzino’s ‘An Allegory with Venus and Cupid’ and an Indian Deveta figure, the two female figures explore the “promiscuous intimacies” of multiple times, spaces, art historical traditions, bodies, desires and subjectivities.

UAP New York worked alongside the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery to assist in the cast bronze creation of this incredible sculpture.

In their suggestive embrace, the intertwined female bodies bear the symbolic weight of communal identities from across multiple temporal and geographic terrains. They evoke non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as foreign and inauthentic, and instead challenge the viewer to imagine a different present and future. This backward glance demands that we understand ‘tradition,’ ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ as impure, heterogeneous, unstable, and always in process, disrupting taken-for-granted national, temporal and art historical boundaries.
Shahzia Sikander, in conversation with Sculpture Magazine.