May 23, 2011
Guest Post: Shahzia Sikander on “The Last Post”
We are kicking off this week with a guest post from the amazing artist Shahzia Sikander. In the paragraphs below, Sikander discusses her collaboration with ICElab composer Du Yun, The Last Post, which will receive its Chicago premiere during our ICElab concert at the MCA on June 4th. Don't sleep!
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I met DuYun at an artist residency program at the Rockefeller foundation in Bellagio.
We got along well, discovered we were practically neighbors in NYC and decided that we’d do a collaboration at some point. So when curator Hou Hanru invited me to create a work to exhibit at the Rockbund museum in Shanghai I immediately knew that I would involve DuYun since she was also from Shanghai. Things fell into place smoothly. I think I can speak on her behalf, we both have been challenged by each other's work and have clearly enjoyed working together.
The Last Post was an outcome of a direction I had started developing in Bellagio. I was doing drawings that referred to the Company School of painting, a period/style developed in eighteenth-century India as Europeans sought documentation of the country’s exotic plants, animals and architecture. The picturesque landscape at the Rockefeller center in Bellagio with its perfectly manicured gardens also played a part in my focusing on this direction. The drawings and video studies were then developed into an animation keeping in mind the context for the Rockbund museum. The focus became the East India Company’s presence in India and its opium trade with China. DuYun's composition takes into account subtle nuances in the animation itself, for example when the protagonist theEast India Company man, who appears in various guises throughout the work, is seen exploding in one instance, the music is not only powerful but deep and even melancholy. The music and visual seems to come together and move apart throughout the piece, which I really appreciated. It allowed both the visual and the music dimensions to be independent and yet participate in the unfolding of the narrative.
in the attached image, DuYun is seen performing live - the detail of the Last Post is the section when the East India Company man is about to explode.
