Artists from the Subcontinent

Artists from India and Pakistan have a strong orientation towards storytelling due to their shared histories, and their acquaintance with the oral tradition of storytelling prevalent in these countries.

Chitra Ganesh
 says "Layering disparate materials and visual languages, I suggest alternative narratives of sexuality and power in a world where untold stories keep rising to the surface. In this process the body becomes a site of transgression, both social and psychic, doubled, dismembered, and continually exceeding its limits."
Ganesh reconfigures history in which women play the protagonists so  gender roles  are reversed and new meanings made.
Ganesh's motifs have the appearance of hybrids: everything proliferates and mingles, defying any type of categorization. Her work is equally influenced by her Indian roots and life in New York or her self-understanding as a member of the queer community. Street art, the image world of the Hindu temple in Flushing, Queens, which she often visited with her parents as a child, album covers of girl rock bands hand-painted posters of Bollywood movies, or the visit to museums -the most various influences have shaped her art. 
http://vimeo.com/44652829

Faiza Butta

Like Shazia Sikander, Faiza Butta has trained as a miniature painter in Lahore's National College of Art.

Butt uses a figurative style and laborious technique because she choses to adhere to the heritage and culture of the East.Butt’s paintings are painstakingly crafted using a near obsessive technique of tiny dots – this style is reminiscent of the par dokht style in miniature painting – a meticulous process that involves the covering of the painted surface with individual dots. 

Many of her works are mug shots of Muslim men found in assorted newspapers and magazines, reinforcing the stereotypical notion of the Muslim man as a terrorist. Yet, Butt’s instinct is to decorate these images and beautify them, making them a source of enjoyment and gratification. The subliminal power of the cropped journalistic image is assessed and exaggerated by the artist, as these portraits are enlarged to a dominating scale.

Once again these images of men are represented with a fantastical narrative, objectifying them into a spectacle. In doing so, the artist seems to be reacting to the portrayal of women as ‘objects of desire’ in art history.

Shazia Sikander

Is an internationally acclaimed Pakistani artist residing in NewYork.She has embraced the formal,structured language of traditional Persian ,Mughal and Hindu Rajput Miniature paintings and Arabic  and Persian calligraphy and reinvented them.While becoming an expert in this technique-driven, often impersonal art form, she has imbued it with a personal context and history, blending the Eastern focus on precision and methodology with a Western emphasis on creative, subjective expression. In doing so, Sikander  has transported miniature painting into the realm of contemporary art.

Her works are  narratives of the contemporary social, political scenario,sexuality and personal history using the mediums of drawings, paintings, installations and videography. Sikander explores in particular, the role of Muslim women and challenges the view Westerners have of associating Islam only with terrorism and the oppression of women.

What I found interesting was that I have started to incorporate elements from Hindu Mythology without being informed about Shazia's work.