Power is rarely static; it is infrastructural. It flows along maritime trade routes, hides within legal frameworks, and disguises extraction behind the quiet polish of imperial portraiture. In High Seas; Closed Skies, her debut exhibition at Victoria Miro since joining the gallery’s roster, Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander brings this mechanism into stark focus.

Trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where she earned her BFA in 1991 before completing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, Sikander has spent more than three decades expanding the manuscript techniques of traditional Indo-Persian miniature painting. In this landmark London show, her meticulous ink and gouache brushwork mutates across media—moving from animated cinema and intricate glass mosaics to luminous works on paper laden with gold leaf.

The Arithmetic of Extraction: 3 to 12 Nautical Miles

At the center of the exhibition hangs 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, an animated cinematic tableau co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, presented by UBS. Having recently illuminated the skyline of Hong Kong on the massive exterior facade of M+, the work makes its London debut accompanied by a haunting, original score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun.

The title invokes the historical expansion of territorial waters—that legal strip between three and twelve nautical miles from a coastline where nations assert, debate, and enforce state sovereignty. Animated directly from hand-painted gouache and ink drawings, the film unpacks the triangular trade web linking the British East India Company, Mughal India, and Qing China during the 19th-century Opium Wars.

The animation stages an exercise in visual counter-archiving. While 19th-century British lithographs almost universally depicted Chinese junks ablaze, Sikander inverts the colonial record: it is the archetypal British warships—the HMS Nemesis and HMS Wellesley—that burst into flames over deep blue waves.

Simultaneously, the humble sampan—the small, locally crewed Chinese wooden boat—enters the frame as a tiny particle, proliferating across the screen until it defies count.

The poppy swells and scatters across the portraits of the powerful – Chinese generals, the assembled East India Company men, Victoria herself.

– As writer Haani Jetha notes in the gallery text.

Yet the narrative does not rest in destruction. The film opens and closes with the shamsa—the traditional solar burst of illumination found on the opening pages of Mughal manuscripts. At the core of the final sunburst, two female faces emerge: a collective feminine presence asserting light over historic violence.

Vitrifying the Pixel: Glass Mosaics and Imperial Cameos

Sikander’s move into glass mosaic mirrors the structural mechanics of her digital animation. Just as a digital video builds volume through thousands of individual pixels, a mosaic aggregates small, vitrified tesserae to construct a unified image.

In Parting Skies, a red tree bleeds down the center over a rising hill, its crimson rivulets frozen mid-fall as opium poppies explode into a clouded sky. Nearby, Queen Victoria sits encased within a mosaic oval frame—the exact silhouette Victorian society reserved for prized parlour miniatures, lockets, and cameos worn directly against the skin.

Sikander exposes how empire absorbed sovereign land into the body of the monarch, turning territory into personal adornment and territorial theft into social refinement.

The exhibition bridges historical trade routes directly into contemporary geopolitical realities. In the large-scale gouache work The Alchemist, Queen Victoria looms in oxidised verdigris green. Her gown dissolves downward not into fabric, but into a mechanical latticework of valves, spools, and fittings belonging to an active oil rig.

In her raised hand, she holds a severed head: the “Company Man”—the suited, anonymous broker of the East India Company. Sikander traces how 19th-century territorial colonialism smoothly evolved into the petro-extractive economies of the present day. The contest over maritime transit in 3 to 12 Nautical Miles mirrors modern flashpoints like the Strait of Hormuz, where narrow legal corridors of water continue to dictate global energy flows.

In The Charter Star, gouache and delicate gold leaf form a swirling sphere reminiscent of the shamsa. Churning through this gold field are potbellied East India Company men clad in precise red tailcoats and buckled shoes. Their faces remain completely indiscernible—emptied of individuality to highlight the systemic nature of imperial corporate power.

Through High Seas; Closed Skies, Shahzia Sikander demonstrates why she remains one of the most vital voices in contemporary global art. By pairing the meticulous discipline of miniature painting with digital animation, glass mosaic, and postcolonial critique, she refuses to let historical archives rest in quiet comfort. Instead, she holds the fragments of empire up to the light, laying bare the systems that continue to shape our world.