CLEVELAND, February 14, 2025: The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is pleased to announce that its presentation of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is on view now. The exhibition premiered at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM), it was a Collateral Event in association with the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. After Collective Behavior closed in Venice, iterations of the show traveled to both Ohio institutions, where they are on view concurrently.
The CMA presents Shahzia Sikander’s art in relation to historical South Asian works from the museum’s collection that inspire her. Collective Behavior includes works that span Sikander’s career and the many mediums that she has used. It comprises a series of conversations between our own time and the past that illuminate the artist’s primary ideas and inquiries. This iteration of Collective Behavior offers a narrative that the CMA is uniquely well suited to share, carrying forward in time the rich histories that are encompassed in the museum’s renowned South Asian collection. Simultaneously, it situates contemporary artistic practice in relation to the global history that precedes it.
For more than three decades, Sikander (born 1969, Pakistan) has been animating South Asian visual histories through a contemporary perspective. Her work reimagines the past for the present moment, proposing new narratives that cross time and place. Working in a variety of mediums, Sikander considers Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics. Her work is rooted in a lexicon of recurring motifs that make visible marginalized subjects. At times turning the lens inward, Sikander reflects on her own experience as an immigrant and diasporic artist working in the United States.
“Shahzia Sikander’s work looks back to our histories and forward to our futures,” said Emily Liebert, Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary art at the CMA. “Through this expansive perspective, she proposes new and deeply relevant narratives that cross time and place, helping us to see with fresh eyes the world we inhabit.”
Collective Behavior is cocurated by Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Liebert at the CMA. For more information visit cma.org.