Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior exhibition

From February 14 to May 4, 2025, the Cincinnati Art Museum presented Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, a career-spanning exhibition of the internationally renowned, New York-based artist. For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) has been reframing South Asian visual histories through a contemporary feminist perspective. Working in a variety of mediums—painting, drawing, print, digital animation, mosaic, sculpture, and glass—she reimagines the past for our present moment. Throughout her practice, she considers diasporic experiences, histories of colonialism, and Western relations with the Global South and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics.

Rather than proceeding chronologically, Collective Behavior follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries throughout her work, rooted as they are in a recurring lexicon of forms, figures, and ideas. The exhibition explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and—perhaps most significantly—as a global citizen engaging with a disrupted historical narrative.

The exhibition design and graphics were created by the Cincinnati Art Museum Design team and photographed by Phil Armstrong.