Shahzia Sikandar is a talented, multifaceted artist whose sculpture work I could not cover in detail in my Artist Presentation. In this blog post, I want to introduce to you guys one of her famous sculptures, Promiscuous Intimacies (42 x 24 x 18 in), featuring the Greco-Roman Venus and the Indian Devata entangled in an embrace. Sikandar has a lot of artwork engaging and challenging traditional representation of ideas that are compelling. She described the female protagonists in this sculpture as “confident, intelligent, and in their playful stance connected to the past in imaginative ways but without glorifying it,” challenging the submissive eurocentric representation of women in art. The suggestive embrace implies a non-hetero-normative narrative often brushed aside as foreign and inauthentic beside women, challenging viewers to reexamine heteronormative assumptions about female relationships.
