On view from 3 September to 2 December, The Window presents The Last Post (2010), an animation by Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander that strips down, confronts and reimagines the past to create shared narratives that run though our present. Drawing on Indo-Persian manuscript traditions and reimagining them through contemporary animation tools, Sikander unfolds a nuanced critique of British colonialism in South Asia. The work opens onto a shifting visual field, composed of hand-drawn images that the artist scanned and animated: Indian courtly architecture, Chinese paper-cut forms, a watercolour map of South Asia, and ornamental motifs dissolve, collide, and reconfigure around a recurring European figure in a red waistcoat, adapted from late 18th-century miniature paintings of East India Company officials. Evoking the Company’s entangled footprint in South Asia and China from the 1600s to 1800s – where it collapsed the boundaries between corporate, military, and sovereign authority. The Last Post interrogates imperial power, historical erasure, and cultural memory.
Available for viewing 24 hours a day at the ground floor of the Time & Life building on Bruton Street, The Window is a public art project by CHANEL Culture Fund. Showcasing compelling works of contemporary digital art, The Window offers passers-by a chance to interact with cutting-edge artworks and engage with this fast-moving genre. Sikander’s The Last Post follows celebrated presentations by Refik Anadol, LuYang, Sarah Meyohas, Universal Everything, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Cao Fei, Petra Cortright, Jacolby Satterwhite, CrossLucid and Cecilia Bengolea.
First exhibited at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, The Last Post has since travelled widely, including a presentation at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) as part of Sikander’s solo exhibition Nemesis. Earlier this year, the work was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C. and is on view in the museum’s new immersive media gallery from July 2025 to July 2026. Its poetic critique of colonial histories has drawn significant attention from critics, including in The Washington Post, for the way it entwines beauty and power in animated form.
Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Her practice spans drawing, painting, animation, mosaics, sculpture and monumental public works that explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. By bringing miniature painting into digital animation, Sikander challenges art historical hierarchies and opens new forms of storytelling.
Sikander has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Asia Society, New York; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions and biennials, including the Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, the Whitney Biennial, and Documenta. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur Genius award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others.
Special thanks to Shahzia Sikander, her studio and Pilar Corrias Gallery for making this installation possible.