(peaceful music)
(gentle music)
As a female, my entire life,
I've been aware of patriarchal spaces
and how erasure is enacted on women in the civic space,
the space of law, the space of art.
You have to open up these spaces to represent all of us.
(gentle music)
For almost three decades, I have worked
in the Indian and Persian manuscript traditions.
Having grown up in Pakistan,
I didn't have access to a lot of the original artwork.
Because of colonial history,
the majority of this work has been torn and dismembered,
and ended up in Western institutions.
Erasure. Lack of visibility.
These things are at the core of my relationship with art.
(gentle music)
Moving between animation, murals, mosaic, and sculpture,
I often think of my practice as an anti-monument,
because it engages the past,
but it doesn't glorify the past.
(gentle music)
I was really inspired by public artwork
and what monuments could stand for.
The conflicts that are there
because people have competing visions of history.
When Madison Square Park
asked me to put a proposal together,
I thought I would love to explore the art
in the courthouse overlooking the park,
and then tie it into the project with the park.
(gentle music)
Works that are here,
which, of course, are part of a history,
it's a moment in time captured for what it is.
(gentle music)
On the roof of the courthouse
are nine statues of ancient male lawgivers or philosophers.
There's Manu, the author of Hindu laws,
and then there's King Louis IV of France.
However, the space of the women
is in this allegorical space, such as the Lady Justice.
(gentle music)
Why couldn't there be another iteration of the feminine,
standing on its own sort of truth as an equal participant?
- Like, if you were there, if you're walking,
you could see both.
I decided to make two sculptures.
One is inside the park.
One is on the roof of the courthouse.
(birds chirping)
So, this is one of the early sketches.
(gentle music)
A signature image in my work has been this feminine body,
kind of a quick gesture,
often emerging out of just gouache on paper.
So it's this sort of very fluid notion of the body,
and it has a multiplicity to it.
It felt very true to me to start there.
What is it? Is it the legs?
- Parts of it.
The legs.
When they're sort of looping back in,
for me, that suggests a form that is self-rooted.
(crew member indistinctly speaking)
- Okay.
The feminine can carry its roots wherever it goes.
It can choose to go wherever it wants.
You don't need to have roots
into one specific space or time,
nation or culture.
(gentle music)
The suggestion of horns
could be a unification through braids.
It has a very clear link to an older painting of mine,
talking more about the courage,
fluidity, and resilience of the feminine.
No one person on a plinth
can represent multiple perspectives,
so it had to be more allegorical,
like a feminine collective space that can keep growing.
(gentle music)
In the sculpture on the rooftop,
she has the seat of the lotus.
It is really symbolic of humility and clarity and wisdom.
My big concern was how to
go in the direction of sculpture,
but keep it as close to my animations
and have as much movement in the work.
You can see how light is coming through the ceiling.
It's very subtle, but it's changing.
Just that itself implies movement.
I wanted to play off of the ceiling in the courthouse,
so the skirt allows it to show
the glass ceiling that the feminine can break through.
Sort of floating here.
(Shahzia chuckles) (gentle music)
Then I can mimic this gorgeous stained glass
with actual glass mosaic on the sculpture.
- So, see, like this.
- Oh, that color is really-
- [Mosaic Artist] Yeah, I have a lot of this.
- [Shahzia] Clean and bright.
- [Mosaic Artist] Yes. It's really a nice color.
- [Shahzia] Yeah. This will work really well.
- [Mosaic Artist] It's beautiful.
- [Shahzia] This can be used in more amount.
- [Mosaic Artist] Yep.
When I was sketching the skirt,
I started to play with the word "havah" on the skirt itself.
In my spoken Urdu, "havah" would mean air,
the breath's relationship to life.
Also, "havah" can imply Eve.
(mosaic artist indistinctly murmurs)
- Let's break this.
- [Mosaic Artist] Okay.
[Shahzia] Eve could be considered the first lawbreaker.
(glass clatters) (gentle music)
Female are often the markers when boundaries are melting.
- The significant of it being just up there is huge!
- Symbolically-
- Yes!
- It's a big intervention.
- Yes.
(speakers indistinctly talking)
Since the work has been up,
there's been a lot of commentary on abortion and women.
The context in this particular project
is allowing the work to have meanings
that it would not carry otherwise.
It animates people's politics and fraught relationships.
I thrive on hearing what happens over time
to a project and to a dialogue.
- Women artists.
How else does an artist center their sense of creativity?
(gentle music)
Whenever we create art and put something in the world,
I believe it just pushes the envelope of
who gets to be represented a little further.
These things are really integral to
how art can then negotiate a space for a future generation.
(gentle music)