ABSTRACT

In 2013, Shahzia Sikander was invited by the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates to create a work of art for the 11th Sharjah Biennale, Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography. The Biennale curator, Yuko Hasegawa, brought a hundred visual artists, architects and musicians who have lived in more than one culture to Sharjah. She selected artists from Asia, North Africa and Latin America whose way of working sidesteps the emphasis on language and logic in Western knowledge production in favour of a portable “embodied knowledge” manifested in native cultural traditions, customs, practices, daily etiquette and architectural spaces. As one of the participants, Sikander’s creative process led to the complex and monumental work Parallax.