Artist Shahzia Sikander’s monumental sculpture “Witness” (2023) was beheaded within the early hours of Monday morning, July 8, on the grounds of the College of Houston campus.
The 18-foot-tall sculpture depicting a feminine determine in a hoop skirt and jabot with braided hair formed into ram horns and vine-like appendages was put in for a short lived exhibition on the college earlier this 12 months. In February, anti-abortion teams denounced the Pakistani-American artist’s work as a “satanic abortion idol” and threatened to protest the show, ensuing within the college’s choice to cancel Sikander’s campus lecture for the opening reception.
“Witness” was vandalized as Hurricane Beryl made landfall alongside the Texas coast, inflicting energy outages and damages throughout the campus and metropolis, mentioned Shawn Lindsey, affiliate vice chairman of Media Relations for the College of Houston.
“The harm is believed to be intentional. The College of Houston Police Division is at the moment investigating the matter,” Lindsey advised Hyperallergic. “Conservators have additionally been referred to as in to advise on the mandatory repairs. We now have been in touch with the artist to restore the art work as shortly as potential.”
The sculpture’s head is within the college’s possession, a spokesperson confirmed.
Sikander has not but responded to Hyperallergic’s request for remark.
“Witness” is amongst three works included in Sikander’s 2023 mission Havah … to breathe, air, life, co-commissioned by the Public Artwork College of Houston System and the Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, and initially displayed on the park in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.
Referencing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the dying of Supreme Courtroom Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sikander mentioned in her assertion in regards to the mission that she sought to seize the “spirit and grit” of the ladies preventing to take care of rights over their our bodies. She added that the works “demand a reimagining of the female not merely as Woman Justice together with her scale, however of the feminine as an lively company, a thinker, a participant in addition to a witness to the patriarchal historical past of artwork and regulation.”
“We anticipated that on a college campus, a middle of studying, there could be necessary dialogue round ‘Witness’ and the artist’s follow. We didn’t anticipate this excessive, violent act,” Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the Conservancy’s creative director and chief curator, advised Hyperallergic.
Earlier this month, an artist’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary on view in an Austrian cathedral was additionally beheaded by an unknown vandal following protests by conservative spiritual teams who seen the art work as “blasphemous.”
