The Brooklyn Rail

In third grade, I was bused with the rest of my Catholic schoolmates to march in the Pro-Life Rally in Washington, DC. We woke up at 3 a.m., packed pre-made sandwiches in coolers, and headed south to save babies. Parish moms and teachers handed us picket signs emblazoned with images of fetuses in petri dishes. We had no choice in the endeavor which, looking back, was decidedly on-brand. Sending children into these situations is absurd, yet I can see how early indoctrination is necessary to make complicit adherents who feel that their often faith-driven/mandated opinions are worth fighting or (ironically) killing for.

I bring it up because I would like to share some thoughts on the July beheading of Shahzia Sikander’s powerful, feminist work Witness (2023) that happened while it was on view at the University of Houston. Although the perpetrator is still not identified, there were multiple protests calling to remove the sculpture and successful pressure to cancel the artist’s speaking engagement by the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life (TRTL). I intentionally say anti-abortion rather than pro-life because their website openly states that they take “no position on capital punishment.” I view these acts, and the similar treatment of crowning (2024) by Esther Strauß in Linz, Austria a mere week prior, as radically motivated censorship. I acknowledge the complexities of arguing on behalf of free speech, but if I can pose a few thought provoking questions regarding the risk-benefit ratio of censorship, I will consider this a successful exercise.

Public artworks have been vandalized across nearly every culture and time period. From Byzantine Iconoclasm to the more recent gluing, painting, and pouring soup on artworks, the reasoning behind the defacement of public art can stem from religious, political, and deeply personal responses. Questions I keep returning to are: Can this urge for violence be traced somewhere? There are several possible motivating factors: xenophobia, misogyny, self righteousness, a sense of duty, entitlement, even amelioration, but nothing feels conclusive. Who stands to benefit from these acts? Many of these nonprofits can only operate because of the donations of a limited group of donors, and their process is virtually opaque. Who is funding these organizations and how are these organizations related to each other? While I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, I believe they are worth examining more deeply in a moment where special interest groups are shaping laws to maximize their own capital and ideological gains with little or no regard for democracy at large.

TRTL was confused regarding which of Sikander’s sculptural works were traveling to Houston. Their initial letters of protest described the work NOW (2023) which was never intended to be displayed there. It indicates wider failure to thoroughly research current events before issuing viral hot-takes on social and traditional media. Tucker Carlson’s ungrounded claim painting the sculpture NOW as a demonic figure placed atop a New York Courthouse was amplified when Michael Knowles explicitly called for its destruction. Shortly after, Ross Douthat of the New York Times essentialized the work as a kind of dilettante witchcraft by likening its potential danger to that of TikTok manifesting videos and psychedelic drugs. If any of them had spoken to Sikander, even once, or read about her work at all, they would have known how deeply she researches all of her projects. They could have recognized that the sculpture’s braided ram horns are based on the architecture of the court building itself, carved into its benches and friezes. They might have understood the feminine skirt to be a place of refuge throughout the catalog of her work. They could have considered alternative translations of the word Havah from the exhibition’s title. They may have been less defensive when confronted with the image of a strong, self-rooted woman and symbol of justice existing in a single form.

But they didn’t. Instead they chose censorship over dialogue, an alarmingly common trend these days, and not by accident. We are witnessing with increasing frequency the suppression of particular narratives through various forms of book bans, attempts to cancel public lectures and exhibitions, and forced resignations. Shahzia’s talk at the University of Houston would have been a perfect forum for anyone objecting to the sculpture to ask her directly about her intentions. Had this talk happened, perhaps it would have staved off the stream of inaccuracies proliferated by Carlson and Knowles. I am forced to wonder where the University of Houston staff were. Where was the committee that selected her work? Where was their defense of the work when the public had such a fundamental misinterpretation of it? Why are we accepting their silence? And what are the implications of individuals’ private interests controlling institutional power?

These questions are not entirely new. Speaking to Shahzia about this experience, I was surprised to learn that Witness was based on an unfinished 2001 mural called A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II. After 9/11, one of the female figures was suddenly perceived to be violent by the commissioning law firm Skadden Arps, and Sikander was asked to remove the panel. She chose to withdraw from the entire project and kept the work in storage until a few years ago, when she revisited the figure in her development of Witness and NOW. The idea that the same image could incur such strong censorship twice, decades apart, is testament to the strength of the story she is trying to tell, and also to the power held in these works.

I am deeply inspired by Sikander’s decision not to repair the sculpture, and to embrace this as an opportunity to transform attempted erasure back into a space for active dialogue.

“In an unexpected way, Witness has lived up to its name… I want to leave it beheaded, for all to see. The work is now a witness to the fissures in our country.”