Artist Shahzia Sikander’s monumental sculpture “Witness” (2023) was beheaded within the early hours of Monday morning, July 8, on the grounds of the University 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 at 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 resolution 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 University of Houston.
“The damage is believed to be intentional. The University of Houston Police Department is currently investigating the matter,” Lindsey informed Hyperallergic. “Conservators have also been called in to advise on the necessary repairs. We have been in contact with the artist to repair the artwork as quickly as possible.”
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 undertaking Havah … to breathe, air, life, co-commissioned by the Public Art University of Houston System and the Madison Square Park Conservancy, and initially displayed at the park in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.
Referencing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the loss of life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sikander mentioned in her statement in regards to the undertaking that she sought to seize the “spirit and grit” of the ladies preventing to keep rights over their our bodies. She added that the works “demand a reimagining of the feminine not simply as Lady Justice with her scale, but of the female as an active agency, a thinker, a participant as well as a witness to the patriarchal history of art and law.”
“We anticipated that on a university campus, a center of learning, there would be important dialogue around ‘Witness’ and the artist’s practice. We did not anticipate this extreme, violent act,” Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the Conservancy’s inventive director and chief curator, informed 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 non secular teams who seen the paintings as “blasphemous.”