This winter, artist Shahzia Sikander lights up the Museum Square with the love story of Madhumalati and Prince Manohar.
Disruption as Rapture is based on Gulshan-i ’Ishq (The Rose Garden of Love, 1657), the Sufi poet Nusrati’s reimagining of the North Indian love story Madhumalati (1545).
After falling in love with Madhumalati in a dream, Prince Manohar sets out to find her. His journey leads him through deserts, enchanted gardens, and palaces, ending with their final reunion in a rose garden.
Shahzia Sikander describes her animations as “kinetic drawings”– handmade illustrations scanned and set in motion using digital software. In Disruption as Rapture, she takes as her starting point an 18th-century manuscript of Gulshan-i ’Ishq, illustrated in the South and Central Asian miniature painting tradition.
Like Manohar, the miniature painting tradition has also travelled – from Persian courts to Ottoman workshops and Mughal manuscripts. Today, the tradition lives on in Sikander’s moving, colourful, and densely detailed “neo-miniatures”. In this way, the poem itself becomes an allegory for how artistic techniques and visual motifs move across languages, religions, and lands.
The presentation of Disruption as Rapture has been made possible through the generous support of The Fredriksen Family Collection.