Shahzia Sikander’s interdisciplinary art offers a unique lens through which to explore colonial and global histories. The artist’s commitment to expressing fluidity and porosity across cultures and art forms offers a rich space for audience interpretation, allowing each viewer to derive personal meaning from the collective public experience. Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, and presented by UBS, Sikander’s latest work – 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, a cinematic tableau of hand-painted images to be screened as part of the M+ Facade program – foregrounds her ability to create visually poetic moving-image art that directly engages with the complex historical and geographical context of Hong Kong.

Here, Sikander reflects on the commission, her longstanding interest in miniature painting, her research into colonial legacies, and the principles that underscore her practice.

The M+ Facade commission furthers your exploration of colonial power in Asia. Can you share more insights into this new work?

The work takes its title from the legal expansion of territorial waters – the zone of sea a nation can claim as its own. This shifting boundary reflects changing ideas about sovereignty, control, and the legal frameworks of empire. The work unfolds as a cinematic tableau, composed of drawings in fluid materials such as ink and gouache, with animated imagery that takes cues from the Opium Wars.

The weakening of Mughal sovereignty under Akbar II, the decline of Qing authority in China, and the rise of the British East India Company were not separate historical developments. As Britain expanded its empire, India became a source of wealth and labor, providing colonial armies that could be mobilized to support British global trade, Hong Kong was seized as an outpost, and China suffered territorial loss and economic destabilization. Political decline in one region enabled exploitation in another. Capturing this system of extraction in animated form, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles visualizes the interconnected, global scale of colonial power and its enduring legacies.

Your work often features female figures and religious and mythological iconography. Can you tell us about these symbols?

The visual lexicon in my work has come about through a recurring set of images, forms, gestures, symbols, and material choices that function like a language over time. As a young artist studying Western art history, I began critically dissecting the orientalist, glossy coffee-table books on Asian, Indian, and Islamic art, which often relied on rigid categories, such as miniature, ceramics, weapons, tapestries, always presented in simplified, repetitive ways. I started to imagine these shadowless depictions of objects as restless entities waiting to be reanimated and claim agency of their own. The iconography that emerged formed a repertoire of figures, often female and sometimes androgynous, carrying ideas of severance, absence, censorship, and renewal.

This approach continues in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles. Motifs and trenchant historical symbols are given shifting identities as they come together to cultivate new associations through movement, repetition, velocity, and magnitude. The piece opens and closes with the shamsa, or sunburst, a symbol of illumination that morphs from floral pattern to fire, from figuration to foliation.

The throne appears as a symbol of power always at risk of unraveling. By placing it within a maritime and animated space, its authority becomes unsettled. It reflects how imperial power persists through legal frameworks, economic routes, and territorial claims, even as its visible forms change.

The poppy carries the violent entanglement of pleasure, addiction, and empire. It collapses beauty and devastation into a single image. In animation, its capacity to bloom, dissolve, and recur allows it to function as a temporal loop rather than a historical footnote.

Cartography recurs as a central visual language, with maps used as instruments of power. This is made explicit in the figure of Queen Victoria wearing a map of India and Hong Kong as a necklace – extraction becomes adornment, conquest becomes refinement.

The British vessel appears as a moving infrastructure that carried law, commerce, violence, and ideology, while the sampan indicates informal labour and survival economies that exist beneath and alongside imperial trade narratives.

Your new work revisits historic trade routes, exploring the shifting networks of power and empire. What draws you to these complex geopolitical histories?

The way history is told and who gets to tell it is shaped by power. Certain voices have traditionally been granted authority while others have been ignored or erased. Challenging these historical and institutional constraints, and the enduring hierarchies of innovation and modernity within art historical narratives, sharpens my understanding of how Western wealth and cultural authority are intertwined with silos of knowledge.

Your 2016 exhibition at Hong Kong’s Asia Society, ‘Apparatus of Power’, established a critical dialogue with the city’s colonial history. A decade later, what continuities and ruptures do you observe?

‘Apparatus of Power’ was conceived in direct dialogue with the city’s colonial architecture, maritime history, and strategic role as a node of imperial exchange. Situated within a former British-military explosives compound, the Asia Society Hong Kong Center was an active historical interlocutor. Its architecture, embedded in systems of surveillance, defense, and control, mirrored the exhibition’s central concern with how power is structured and aestheticized.

My engagement with Hong Kong in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles is continuous in its concern with empire, maritime power, and visual regimes of authority, although my current thinking grapples more directly with what it means to inhabit the aftershocks of those systems.

Viewing your new animation on the M+ Facade will, of course, be different from experiencing your paintings in a gallery. As someone who has pioneered new forms of miniature painting, how do you think about this shift in scale?

The work speaks in a public, unavoidable register – it literally enters the visual economy of Hong Kong, permeating ferry routes, trade corridors, and nightly commutes. It asserts itself into the city’s rhythm, implicating the city’s present-day visibility, finance, and infrastructure in the historical systems it visualizes. What I find so extraordinary is that the moving image will occupy the same horizon once traversed by colonial ships and transform M+’s exterior into a contemporary screen for imperial afterlives.

You collaborated with the animator Patrick O’Rourke on 3 to 12 Nautical Miles and the musician Du Yun will score the gallery version. How do interdisciplinary collaborations impact your art?

Critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration are the three principles that ground my understanding of what it means to be an artist. My practice operates at the intersections of culture, society, and economy, and within the ways communities form, interact, and sustain themselves. These overlapping spaces are where I see art functioning, and interdisciplinary collaboration amplifies that understanding.

With Patrick O’Rourke, our work sustains a dialogue where animation and video are processes of transformation – breaking forms apart and rebuilding them, exploring movement and temporality to extend dialogues begun in static images. Du Yun’s engagement with polyphonic rhythm is about textural convergence and accumulation of sound, a process I find intuitively familiar. The scale and intensity of her sonic language resonate with my reliance on highly saturated color as an emotional register.

You studied miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. How have you navigated the art form’s traditional parameters to engage with contemporary discourse?

Although the National College of Arts [NCA] was a haven for creative exploration, miniature painting was dismissed as backward and irrelevant when I joined in 1987, and my impulse to look closely at what was being refused became a generative point of entry. I sensed the possibility of rethinking how indigenous practices might be understood as critical, living languages capable of renewed relevance. The Scroll [1989–90], my NCA thesis, laid to rest the debate about miniature’s inability to engage the youth and launched what is known as the Neo-Miniature movement.

My interest in reworking miniature painting comes from a desire to question power structures, particularly through feminist perspectives that reconsider whose stories matter. My journey has been about creating an emotional, not only intellectual, dialogue with miniature painting within a changing geopolitical order around global art, where formal, cultural, and geographic boundaries remain porous.