Other figurative works from European Renaissance and Baroque era that Naiza alludes to include Susanna and the Elders, another Biblical theme about voyeurism and the refusal by Susanna of the sexual advances of the Elders, which was depicted by numerous painters, famously by Artemisia Gentileschi in 1610.

Naiza has also paid homage to the Japanese masters of the "Hoating world," such as Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1808). More recently, she has created, firstly by her abstracted reinterpretation in Dream of Awabi (2000), and next, by directly citing in Two Corsets (2005), Katsushika Hokusai's Awabi Fisherwoman and Octopus (c 1814), a work which depicts a transgressive sexual encounter between a woman and an octopus, These visual references evoke well-established artistic traditions that visually incorporated the figure in the female figure in complex psycho­logical and sexual dynamics. But they are also artistic traditions distant in time, place, and tradition, and cannot be easily inhabited by the artist 01' her audience. These referents are there­fore primarily allegorical.

Absent from Naiza's referents is the female figure from Islamic or Mughal art, or even the art of Buddhist and Hindu temple sculpture that certainly abounds in depictions of the female form. Nor is there any reference to lived vernacular and local ceremonies at Sufi shrines, the lives of hiiras, and other discrepant practices that persist into the present, despite legal and moral strictures of modern South Asian Islam. Nor do we find in her work any reference to the predicament of the female body as subject to relentless social expectations in the modern West, a theme that has been explored by numerous contemporary artists and pho­tographers such as Vanessa Beecroft and Lauren Greenfield2. Absent also from Naiza's works are direct references to controversies regarding veiling, the dupatta, the burqa, the chador, and the head scarf, which have become a staple of Western media representations of Muslim women, but are also of concern internally in Muslim countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and especially since the Zia era, in Pakistan itself. While these references might be overtly missing, they nevertheless remain the structuring absence around which the extended work of the artist coheres. The reasons for these absences are therefore strategic and structurally central to Naiza's work.

Naiza's local references, on the other hand, are not primarily visual but language-based. One finds these discursive citations in her works from 1993 inspired by the Musaddas of Hali, and in the titles of works such as Nine Parts of Desire (1997) and Heavenly Ornaments (2005). These works frequently refer to situated texts of modern South Asian Islam. Others, such as Tayyar Intezar Khamosh (2006), inscribe commanding imperative statements in Urdu (be prepared, be patient, be silent), whose source and addressee nevertheless remain elusive or blank, and therefore allegorical.

The contestation in Muslim and non-Muslim countries (such as France and the UK) over the visibility of the Muslim woman's body is increasingly no longer a matter of everyday lived practices subject only to local approval or censure, but a debate that has emerged into the full public and juridical purview of the nation-state and has in fact become globalized due to its visibility in transnational media. As such, the debate over the body of the contempo­rary Muslim woman cannot be folded back into localized everyday practices that are simply lived in relative non-awareness and non<ompliance of scripturalist and discursive norms. Today's South Asian Muslim woman's body is thus a product of an extended process of modernity that has been unfolding since the nineteenth century.

Islamic reform movements in South Asia that have been active since the nineteenth century were predicated on the 1055 of Muslim political power in the wake of British colonialism, when Muslim morality and law were no longer even conceived to be enforceable by the u/ema or the state. Reform movements effectively deployed lithographic print media in Urdu to produce a vast literature of reformist texts that sought to create an individuated ethical and moral Muslim character to compensate for the loss of sovereignty3. Barbara Metcalf has argued that the Bihishti Zewar, an important milestone in this project, addressed itself to the reform of Muslim women, viewing them as equally capable of becoming educated and moral agents as men, by shedding abhorrent local customs and adhering more closely to scripturalist practices that Thanawi interpreted for the early twentieth century ashraf (respectable) Muslim context. Notably, the title of the work is itself allegorical:

The "heavenly ornaments" of Thanawi's title, one might add, are not women themselves as adornments or ornaments of domestic life. There is no notion that women are the Victorian "angel of the house," that in their protected sphere they rise to a higher and purer morality. ... The "ornaments" in Thanawi's work are rather a metaphor for the virtues both women and men must cultivate in themselves, the virtues that will earn them the pearls and bracelets of heaven (Qur'an 22:23)4.

The artist enacts a further allegorical turn in the trope of "heavenly ornaments" in her most recent works, as I discuss shortly.

I did not make the chastity belt for a long time, resisting the idea of reproducing something without altering it, although it has been in my mind for ages, (you know I first saw the belt in the Doge Palace Museum in Venice in 19951 and while doing this work, I was also con­stantly thinking about it...

So the belt has finally been made! With a zip rather than a lock ... that implies the fact that this object has a flexibility and the owner has a "choice" in the matter....

Naiza's work demonstrates that freedom for women is not a simple matter of transgressing or overthrowing repressive social mores, as the very delineation of what is possible to accomplish as an agent emerges within the discursive constraints of the social order. To grasp this, one needs an understanding of subject formation under modern conditions of power. Recent scholarship, inspired by Michel Foucault's late works, has traced how under modernity since the nineteenth century, a dense matrix of institutional power exerted at a microscopic level throughout the social fabric, has shaped the modern subject.

Saba Mahmood succinctly summarizes this insight5:

Power, according to Foucault, cannot be understood solely on the model of domination as something possessed and deployed by individuals or sover­eign agents over others, with a singular intentionality, structure, or location that presides over its rationality and execution. Rather, power is to be under­stood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses. Secondly, the subject, argues Foucault, does not precede power relations, in the form of an individuated consciousness, but is produced through these relations, which form the necessary conditions of its possibility. Central to his formulation is what Foucault calls the paradox of subjectivation: the very process and con­ditions that secure a subject's subordination are also the means by which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent.

An important example of this paradox of subjectivation can be seen at work over the public visibility of women during the Zia era. It is well understood that during the Zia years in the late 1970s and 80s, numerous rights for women enshrined in Pakistani law were "rolled back" by the regime's Islamization process. Women had certainly become subject to overt state repression during the Zia years, but Shahnaz Rouse has shown that this sanction indexes a more complex shift in the public role of women. While men had long controlled the private sphere of women's lives, discursive control over the public sphere was instituted as well during the Zia era, as seen in repressive legal injunctions and formulations of proper attire for women in the media6. Not accidentally, it was precisely during these years that women gained much greater public visibility. As Farida Shaheed has noted:

[T]he Zia decade, marked by retrogression and the rhetoric of the religious right, saw the largest number of women entering the formal labor market, and the informal sector. Female applicants for higher education increased. In urban areas, even as dress codes became more uniform, an unprecedented number and new class of women started appearing in public places such as parks and restaurants7.

The Zia regime's measures were thus not simply attempting to "roll back" existing women's rights, they are also striving to exert state power to control an essentially new phenomenon, the emergent presence of women in the public arena. But the very attempt itself paradoxi­cally amplified the emergence of the publicly visible female body as an issue that cannot be simply rolled back. The increased scrutiny the public female body has undergone in Pakistan since the 1980s indexes this important shift.

I made some images in my little book in July last year. These were drawings of "bullet proof vests. 11 I was intrigued by them, and felt they needed to be made in metal. At the same time they felt like something very soft close to the body, like fabric. ...

The idea of trapping and protection comes together in these pieces. An ambiguous thought, not sure where one idea stops and the other begins... something so prevalent in our society.

Naiza's works insistently remind us of this paradox of subjectivation. In order for the voice and the body of the woman to emerge into public space from a condition of invisibility and subalternaity, its presence must be recognized and shaped by discursive norms. Naiza's works are deeply ethical and political, resulting from the artist's rigor and commitment to their extended formal development. They translate and expand the language of feminist sculptural practice developed by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Cathy de Monchaux and others since the 1960s into the Pakistani/Islamic context, by creating references to the body of discursive debate relevant to modern South Asian Muslims.

The artist foregrounds the unrelenting processual nature of her exploration, by the use of drawing as her primary exploratory medium. Her figures appear inherently incomplete, and thus become allegories, in that they do not provide us with sealed and finished figures and objects. Even when her drawings are graphically rich, they remain tentative, probing, and compulsively worked over. They correctly refuse to enact a false synthesis by creating "finished" works that might suggest that an end to this insistent exploratory process has come by way of a harmonious resolution of women's public identity.

It is a further credit to Naiza's sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the question of subjectivity of the (female) body that she never creates works that simply assert a putative freedom or liberation for women living under repressive social and religious strictures.

The leaking, unraveling, porous, and ejaculating body fails, or refuses to recognize the limits of its skin, and needs to be coaxed into compliance by an elaborate physical, dis­cursive, and juridical apparatus. The body articulates its form by arming and shaping itself in relation to this apparatus that simultaneously enables its definition by subjugating its excess The dilemma of subjectivation is that without this social apparatus, the body itself ceases to exist as an entity that can inhabit the modern public sphere with a legible, normative voice. Naiza's works recognize these discursive imperatives, but also attend to the protesting body as discursive violence is enacted upon it The artist's insistent and con­tinuous return to this question in her work thus recognizes the centrality but also the intrac­tability of the dilemma of women's subjectivity, which cannot be extricated from its social demarcation. The choice of executing the latest works in metal suggests that this dilemma has only intensified in recent years.

Moreover, her insistent and repetitive foregrounding of the questions of the place of the body in discursive frameworks deftly avoids appeals to premodern South Asian identities that are usually held up as zones of freedom from discursive scripturalism. Naiza's refusal to evoke references to South Asian and Islamic visual artifacts deny us an easy avenue of escape into a romanticized premodern South Asian or Islamic past-localized Sufi prac­tices, the glories of Mughal tolerance, and lived syncretistic harmony between Hindus and Muslims, etc-that are said to have existed before the emergence of modern identities. This is not to suggest that these projections and practices cannot be attractive or compel­ling aspirations for individuals and groups, nor to claim that a persistent gap does not exist between norms and lived practices of modern individuals and groups. Nor is it intended to minimize the appeal of Westernized lifestyles, which are by now inextricably part of the lives of many South Asian Muslims. It is however, to take seriously the implica­tions of the South Asian Muslim reformist project unfolding now for over a century, which strives to compare such practices in relation to its imperatives. Even when modern lived practices might remain at considerable variance from the discursive and scripturalist ideals, they nevertheless have become subject to judgment by these norms. This is not a process that appears to be reversible In this respect, the premodern or vernacular syncretistic utopia is as unattainable as a public norm as the Japanese "floating world" of the eighteenth century, or the place of the body in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. By her avoidance of images of the Muslim veil and also of the contemporary Western body, Naiza refuses to be diverted by the charged, yet super­ficial media debates that equate the modern Muslim veil with subjugation, or the reverse, equally superficial arguments by apologists who claim that the veiled woman is "freer" than the Westernized female body under the thrall of mediatized and spectacularized sexuality.

By the enactment of allegory, Naiza is able to concentrate her efforts in exploring the under­lying dilemma of subjectivation, in which subjugation to the norm also opens up the possibil­ity of articulation. The welding points on the metal armatures are further allegorized as Heavenly Ornaments, suggesting that the terrible beauty of the violent forging of the metal joint is a necessary accomplice for subjective expression. The works in metal do appear to offer a choice-the ability to wear them or discard them at will. But this choice is essentially an impossible one, in that it is situated between the inarticulate, excessive, and private body, and the normative female body that is increasingly public and visible but forged by discursive norms that allow it to speak only by simultaneously working both violence and protection upon its bodily excess.