The Pleasure of Dislocation

John Haber
in New York City

Shahzia Sikander, Asal Peirovi, and Cindy Ji Hye Kim

Shahzia Sikander was still an undergraduate when she completed The Scroll, in 1990. Already she was testing the limits of the past. It shows multiple rooms and nearly fifty people, making themselves at home. But which of their stories is hers?

She might still be looking for an answer, in "Extraordinary Realities" at the Morgan Library. Her thesis project for the College of Arts in Lahore, in Pakistan, it has no curved edges and seems unlikely to scroll. It could equally well be an accordion book that refuses to fold, lest it hide any of its discoveries. Past and present collide in drawing, too, for Asal Peirovi on the train from her village in Iran to an uncertain future. Cindy Ji Hye Kim may be sharing her own earliest memories as well, but in sculpture. Not that she is giving them over without a fight, leaving them in fragments.

Women and monsters

Shahzia Sikander all but demanded to find her place in the past when she asked to study miniature painting. If it seems odd to say that Islam's artistic heritage was out of fashion, book art could use a little respect even today. And illuminated manuscripts will never be less than vital at the Morgan, which asks her to pick a few from its collection. One from around 1800 is so small but thick as to defy the very notion of an open book, while angels in another bring food and other precious gifts to a sage who has renounced his kingdom to live in the wilderness—and in a magical, glowing night. By using them to introduce her work, across from a show of recent acquisitions in contemporary drawing, the museum asserts its place in the present, too.

Does the scroll show discrete episodes or a diorama? More than either, it shows a woman taking stock of her life. She enters at left, and she returns again and again in the same dress. A couple of years later, she returns to the scene of her coming out or coming in, but the colors have darkened, and the rooms have all but emptied. Checkered floor tiles spin out in a perspective other than linear. The ground has shifted beneath her feet, and it was time she moved on.

She never loses her debt to miniatures, with their precise but fluid line. And her subject remains, as later titles have it, Uprooted Order or Pleasing Dislocation—all the more so since Sikander left for the United States. She discovered, too, that the dislocation was not just hers. At the Rhode Island School of Design and then the Glassell School of Art in Houston, she encountered a nation of immigrants and a nation torn by racism and race. A black man's face floats at the center of a drawing, dominant or dislocated, too. He joins a growing and ever-more fantastic cast, including humans, animals, monsters, and everything in between.

Trends in diversity aside, cultural identity for Sikander is never all that fixed. She worked with Project Row Houses, which brings art to Houston's third ward, a long-time African American neighborhood. Yet her interest in architecture fades, as literally confining, while the ground never quite returns. Her colors broaden as well, as she shifts from ink and gouache to ink and watercolor, welcoming its flow. She draws on Persian rugs, like figurative flying carpets, and she has appeared in a show of "banners of persuasion." She appears in the 2021 Asia Society triennial, but with work from 1989.

If you have to feel dislocated, what better place for it than New York, where she moved in 1997? While the show sticks largely to her first dozen years of work, she has since taken up animation as well. It requires a harder line that limits her, but its subjects do (slowly) transform into one another. She was already experimenting with abstraction at RISD, although for her that can mean the silhouettes of uprooted people. Still, it prepared her for the show's abstract centerpiece, on hanging strips of tracing paper. It may recall unstretched canvas for Sam Gilliam, an artist of color, but as a site-specific installation.

If identity for Sikander is always unsettling, that includes gender. She is interested, as the Morgan points out, in female multiplicity, just as with her multiple appearances in The Scroll. Women in more recent work adopt veils, leaving open the encounter between gender and religion. Stereotypes appear more than ever, to be celebrated and challenged. They include dancers and gopi, or female cowherds, who rise up in rebellion. They may still be at home among the cows, but they may never fall back to earth.

Tunneling through mountains

In tunneling through mountains, three minutes and twenty seconds can be a very long time. More than time enough to take in the train itself—those seats and strangers you had barely noticed until the windows went dark. Time enough to feel its speed in sound echoing off the tunnel walls. Time enough to wonder at an engineering marvel and at mountains that stood long before it and that you cannot see. Time enough, too, for a growing anxiety of confinement, before at last the train breaks into the light. For a few brief moments, its whoosh swells to a crescendo before falling away, leaving you to question where you are.

I doubt that I have experienced anything like that for half as long (and, believe me, three minutes stuck between stations on the subway is no marvel at all). Asal Peirovi has, and she has translated it into acrylic and ink for "Passing Through Alborz Range in 3' 20"." Her care with the time is not the precision of science, but the precision of felt experience, and a marvelous short essay by Ashkan Zahraei supplies the details. Peirovi took the train often between Sari, her hometown in northern Iraq, to study painting in Tehran. She got to know the changing countryside along the way, from the Hyrcanian forest through small towns and the Alborz mountain range, before reaching the capital's urban sprawl. Like her journey, her works on paper are in no way confined to the tunnel, but one can see why it came to dominate her memories and to supply the show's title.

Her drawing has the precision of experience, too—which is to say a fine line, an often elusive subject, and a serious dose of fantasy. The brand of ink, Ecoline, boasts of the fluidity of watercolor, and Peirovi relies on thin acrylic for a similar combination of line and fluid spaces. Both media come in color as well. Each drawing centers on a fragment of architecture, with the clear, hard edges of modern design and ancient mosaics. In her rendering, the Gadook Tunnel itself looks like a castle set into mountains. It may be from life, but it could almost as easily be from the perils and paradoxes of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and late Baroque theater.

Peirovi sets her crisp architecture into loose daubs and crests of black ink, for a contrast between humanity and nature. They evoke the calligraphy of traditional Persian painting, but from her materials alone, while her brush looks elsewhere. They may represent houses and tunnels amid plants, trees, or rocks. Uncertainty seems built right in. Her trip took her through Veresk, a small town to which a relative had moved. The tokens that the woman left behind became all the more mysterious at her unexplained death.

Memory is always uncertain, and Peirovi knew well what it was like to tunnel right through the landscape without stopping to know more. Rural life must have come to embody the mystery, just as Sari stood for home and Tehran for a wider world. Could I have underestimated them all? I had not heard of the mountains, the tunnel, or the Veresk Bridge. I know "Hyrcanian" only from the "Hyrcanian beast," whatever that is, of the player's speech in Hamlet. I still cannot say why the play pauses for so long to hear him out.

Even given the drive to diversity in art today, galleries have had a striking number of Iranian artists, as with "Iran Modern" at the Asia Society, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Shirin Neshat, and others that I have failed ever to mention. New York may have so many because Tehran is a cultural capital that draws them in, but within a harsh state that drives them away. It must hold out the excitement of learning from others and working side by side, just as here, but with serious limits on expression. I may be imposing my biases, badly, and I have a lot to learn. But could a tunnel's confinement also stand for the artist's? Born in 1985, Peirovi could not have known life under colonialism, the shah of Iran, or the revolution at first hand, only real and broken promises, and other works center on fences. She seems about as far as one can get from political art, but the personal is the political, too.

Samplers and storybooks

Cindy Ji Hye Kim opens with four standing sculptures in blond wood—mere plywood really, receding from the entryway like successive steps in recovering the past. Their patterns recall samplers and storybooks, only carved, with more images on handmade paper at the center of each one. Flowers surround a bed, with two sleeping figures in close company, and two adults hurry past, male and female, in a top hat and beehive hairdo. Kim calls them mother and father, but she might know them only from a story. If she hints in the press release at associations with H.D., the poet, and Sigmund Freud in the role of Janus, the two-faced god, your memories may take precedence after all. If they are little more than shadows at that, they haunt the present as well.

The shadows deepen in the next room, where the images take on a life of their own. In graphite on silk, suspended from the ceiling, the bed looks that much barer and crossed be shadows, but of what? Could they be shadows of the wood itself? In a second drawing, shadowy figures hold hands in a circle, like schoolroom entertainment, but also like a dark ritual. With titles like Nameless Hour and Feign'd Vestal, their comforts seem unlikely to last, but then the entire show is "In Despite of Light." That must include the unspoiled whiteness of the seemingly woven paper, like an emblem of childhood innocence.

Innocence is overrated, if it means an inability to fulfill its promises by growing up. That is the subject of almost every children's book—and every first novel with a young hero on the verge of becoming a writer. Elena Ferrante's heroine must leave her brilliant childhood companion behind. Has Kim outgrown her fears or brought them with her into the studio? Look again, and the sculptures could also be easels, like studio easels for Iman Raad. No wonder they hold paintings.

Surrounding the hanging drawings, more birch wood patterns create a space for the viewer to enter. It could be a quiet space, like a trellised garden open to the light, but also a space for incomplete or unchecked growth. In its light, the four opening works may look more personal and less comforting than you may have imagined. Now their sleepers look restless, and the window above them lets in way too much light, as if they really should be now have made it out of bed. One carving picks up on "father," only upside-down. Others are body parts, including a pelvis and a spine.

Bones appear again in the gallery's second show, where Mateo López identifies them as his own. He collects objects with a past that have lost their function, like gourds. More regular elements might be minimalist color studies while still caught up in his history. He places them all on a table, whose circle surrounds a gallery column and refuses to close. López calls the show his "Círculo de Palabras" (or circle of words), with all the obsession with art as language of Minimalism's decade, too. Yet they remain silent.

His silence does not speak to me. Both artists are in search of a heritage, with Kim born in Korea and López, who trained as a Latin American architect, in Bogotá (where Cecilia Vicuña worked as well). Both also have more personal associations than they can honestly convey. Kim speaks of one sequence as a phénakistoscope, and do not be ashamed if you do not recognize the word for an early device for creating moving pictures from still images. Still, her memories are vivid and relevant to the world of an artist, like the Korean artists in "Only the Young" at the Guggenheim, as his are not. Maybe one day, with luck, the moving pictures will move me, too.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Shahzia Sikander ran at The Morgan Library through September 26, 2021, Asal Peirovi at Chapter NY through June 12. Cindy Ji Hye Kim and Mateo López ran at Casey Kaplan through April 30, 2022. A related review follows Sikander to Madison Square Park and the halls of justice.