Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings IV

Sikander acknowledges that she is driven by “an urgent reexamining of colonial and imperial stories of race and representation.” The many heads and circles in this work suggest the many lenses through which the artist or the viewer (who is the I eyeing in her title?) could, as Sikander says, “question the neat and tidy classification systems that control and maintain social structures.”

Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings IV, 1994–97
Watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper
Collection of James Casebere
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.