In Conversation: Shahzia Sikander with Yasmeen Siddiqui and Alpesh Kantilal Patel

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Join us for a wonderful conversation between Shahzia Sikander, Yasmeen Siddiqui, and Alpesh Kantilal Patel. They discuss The Glass Mosque; a collaboration among Sikander, composer Vijay Iyer, poet Bhanu Kapil, and author Fred Moten. Sikander, Iyer, Kapil, and Moten are equal partners in this three-year creative project which began in 2022. The Glass Mosque will be realized as a book produced by Siddiqui and potentially an artwork.

Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others. Sikander's major new outdoor project, an 8 foot bronze female sculpture, is currently on the roof of the Appellate Courthouse in Manhattan. An accompanying 18 foot bronze female sculpture was exhibited in Madison Square Park until June 2023, and marked the first collaboration between the Madison Square Park Conservancy and courthouse.  

Yasmeen M. Siddiqui is the founding artistic director of Minerva Projects, a small independent press based in the Hudson Valley. Minerva cultivates writings by feminists, wanderers, and translators. She is co-editor, with Alpesh Kantilal Patel, of Storytellers of Art Histories (Intellect Press, 2022). She has been published by: Studio International, Phaidon, Samsung Museum of Art, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, Flash Art, NKA, the Cairo Times, iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), the Americas Society, among others. Awards received include the Ucross Foundation as a writing fellow. Her work with artists has been recognized by Independent Curators International and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Siddiqui is on the faculty at Pratt Institute and serves as a board member of Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA).

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is the 2023 UrbanGlass Curator-At-Large and associate professor of contemporary art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture within Temple University in Philadelphia. His art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. He is the author of Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017) and is currently working on his monograph Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories, under contract with Manchester University Press.