QUEER RUIN: Postcolonial Remix and Classical Remix in Shahzia Sikander's Work

Ruins are everywhere in the discourses of modernity, underpinning European claims to civilizational superiority, fundamentally imbricated in historicism and nation and origin-thinking from Greece, to the Middle East, to South Asia. Taken from Sadia's current book project, "Space in Another Time: Ruins and the Management of Life", the talk will present this formation's colonial genealogy, its postcolonial nationalist manifestation and then take up the way Shahzia Sikander's sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies, uses a queer lens to critique the racialized, gendered and nationalist matrix of ruin thought.