In-Verse engages the vernacular of the Islamic book arts to question how tradition is defined and disseminated. The Historical miniatures and illuminated manuscripts were often torn apart and sold during the colonial period with pages that flowed into the global marketplace.
Historically, the movement of objects and motifs, such as in trade, migration, colonial occupation forced meaning to shift across cultures creating often opposing narratives though redaction.

In-Verse evokes an inherent dislocation at the heart of dismembered historical manuscript and miniature painting genre to shed light on its truncated history. The classical motif of Mughal architecture and its imperious authority is belied by the buoyant hair silhouette operating as a particle system against it. The silhouette form derived from the head of female stock characters from within the miniature painting lexicon dances in circular movement unhinged from its constricted representation, freed to create its own history and ‘verse’ its own narrative.

In-Verse is a large-scale book which uses the traditional screen printing technique with hand painting to link historical illuminated manuscript and brings it into dialogue with current time through the rich tradition of pigment on paper.

Championing the personal and the private to subvert the patriarchal and fixed historical representations within the Indo-Persian miniature painting tradition as well as in the broader culture and society, Sikander’s multi-valent practice aims to highlight uncertainties and hierarchies of power. Informed by South Asian, American, Feminist and Muslim perspectives, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged approach to this time-honored medium––employing its continuous capacity for reinvention to interrogate ideas of language, trade and empire, and migration.