RaceB4Race Region and Enmity Keynote Conversation with Shahzia Sikander

MacArthur Fellowship-winning visual artist Shahzia Sikander’s vibrant body of work in a range of media reveals an extraordinary relationship with the materials, images, and artistic traditions of the premodern world, and with the political, religious, and cultural tensions that connect that world to our own. Sikander builds a visual vocabulary to express the cross-cultural dialogue and hybrid forms of identity and expression that are always there, suppressed but present, across the centuries.

In conversation with Kishwar Rizvi, Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University, and the RaceB4Race Executive Board, Shahzia Sikander will discuss the interplay between the “traditional” techniques (such as Indo-Persian miniature painting) and the striking and at times incongruous imagery that enable her work to connect inexorably past and present. As the keynote conversation for the RaceB4Race Region and Enmity symposium, this event will ask questions about the “enmity” that intersects the racial and regional alliances of the conference theme. Sikander’s work makes clear that enmity is not only armed engagement or a mappable conflict zone, but is also an intimate and codependent relationship that is also always a struggle for dominance and control.

RaceB4Race is brought to life by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in partnership with The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities and the Hitz Foundation.

The Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) was established in 1981 by the Arizona Board of Regents as a state-wide, tri-university research unit that bridges the intellectual communities at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. Located centrally on the campus of Arizona State University, ACMRS is charged with coordinating and stimulating interdisciplinary research about medieval and early modern literature and culture.