Pakistani artist installs ‘lady justice’ outside US court

Shahzia Sikandar, a Pakistani-origin American artist has installed her version of ‘Lady Justice’ called Havah…to breathe, air, life outside a US court.

The new sculpture has become the first female figure to grace one of the ten plinths atop Manhattan’s powerful New York appellate courthouse.

Talking to *The New York Times, Shahzia’s stated, “Standing among Moses, Confucius and Zoroaster is the shimmering, golden eight-foot female sculpture, emerging from a pink lotus flower and wearing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature lace collar.”

While talking about her sculpture, NOW Sikandar told the outlet, “The sculpture was part of an urgent and necessary cultural reckoning underway as New York, along with cities across the world, reconsiders traditional representations of power in public spaces and recasts civic structures to better reflect 21st-century social mores.”

She added, “The work was called NOW because it was needed “now,” at a time when women’s reproductive rights were under siege after the US Supreme Court in June overturned the constitutional right to abortion.”

Another of Sikandar’s sculpture, Witness, sits inside Madison Square Park, New York, a monumental female figure measuring 18 feet tall and wearing a hoop skirt inspired by the courtroom’s stained-glass ceiling dome.

Sikandar’s work has also featured in a global magazine, Time Out’s best outdoor arts in New York list.

Talking about her work the publication wrote, “The figure’s twisted arms and legs suggest tree roots, referencing what the artist has described as the ‘self-rootedness of the female form; it can carry its roots wherever it goes’.”

You can even use your smartphone to bring the figure to life through AR technology.