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Rashid Rana is an artist at the vanguard of Pakistani Contemporary art. His art broadly addresses globalisation while also exploring and critiquing socio-political specificities, such as the simmering differences between India and Pakistan, as well as tensions within Pakistan. Though issues manifesting in his work stem from specific events and spheres, his idiom traverses those to communicate to a global audience. This accessibility owes much to... Rashid Rana is an artist at the vanguard of Pakistani Contemporary art. His art broadly addresses globalisation while also exploring and critiquing socio-political specificities, such as the simmering differences between India and Pakistan, as well as tensions within Pakistan. Though issues manifesting in his work stem from specific events and spheres, his idiom traverses those to communicate to a global audience. This accessibility owes much to Rana’s technique of interweaving traditional artistic practices with new media. His more recent works, including “Red Carpet 3”, are a refinement of his process of arriving at an artistic language. He has seamlessly moved from the traditional space to his current mode of expression—that of the photographic mosaic.

Rana’s process of arriving at his photographic mosaics was a decade-long process of exploring and experimenting with painting, photography and video. He was trained in traditional painting, including the miniature techniques which the Lahore School of Art prided itself in, before going to the Massachusetts College of Art in the 1990s. In that decade, Pakistani neo-miniature artists had begun concerning themselves with adapting Mughal art techniques to more contemporaneous themes. This included a preoccupation with popular culture, kitsch and broadcast imagery. Attempts at reconciling the schism between ‘high art’ and ‘mass culture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘contemporaneity’ impacted Rana whose later works, such as the “Red Carpet” series, redress these differences. While he continued to make paintings, he had begun to distance himself “from the actual process of execution” (Adnan Madani, “Thinking Inside the Box: 6 Notes on Rashid Rana”, Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010, pg.14). This distancing led to his foray into digital media and photography in the mid-1990s, and subsequently he abandoned paint altogether. As digital technology rapidly entrenched itself in the city, he delved into the medium to understand it better. His interest in the formation of grids and matrices manifested into the photographic mosaic, which is seen in the “Red Carpet” series. These later works deal with traditional and urban subject matter composed of hundreds of smaller images borrowed from quotidian scenes in Pakistan. The build-up of the larger image from smaller images which are thematically contradictory has set his photomontages apart. This was to define his oeuvre from 2002 onwards.

The elaborateness of the photomosaic assumed epic proportions with Rana’s “Red Carpet” series, executed in 2007. Among his most celebrated works, it has been the subject of many critical essays on the artist. Red Carpet 1, an earlier work in the series, sold in 2008 at a price that made it the most expensive work by any Pakistani artist. While each of the prints resembles a Persian carpet, they are made up of gruesome images of slaughtered animals lying in a pool of blood. Speaking of the significance of this paradoxical juxtaposition of images, art historian, Kavita Singh notes that “...an iconic object turns out to be built of banal or revolting things that are seldom seen worthy of being turned into ‘images’. One has the sense here of moving from surface to depth, from media image to unseen truth” (“Meaning, In Its Fragments”, Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010, pg.13).

Red Carpet 3, like the preceding works, addresses a number of dualities—that of beauty and death, of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Adnan Madani observes that “The images...pose a challenge to the ‘aesthetic’ sensibility, that must simultaneously be able to appreciate and evaluate objects of value and beauty (connoisseurship), and to accept the mundane presence of death and banal violence in the general economy. In a sense, making art (or other objects of beauty like the oriental carpets) and killing are both activities which acquire their significance in modern life through extremely developed forms of ritual, and through the creation of specialized spaces where the rules of the outside world are temporarily suspended: museums and galleries for art, and slaughterhouses for the killing of animals. Through bringing the two terrains together, Rana temporarily restores an original violence to each, and makes their parasitic codependency explicit.” (“Thinking Inside the Box: 6 Notes on Rashid Rana” Rashid Rana, Karachi, May-2008). On Rana’s presentation of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional form, Michael Hilsman argues that “This view is conceptually much closer to the way humans perceive the world, where there is no one view, where any one person can represent an entirely unique and autonomous existence.” He goes on further, saying that “It is this tension between the narrative and its relation to the two-dimensional surface that Rana is constantly exploring in nearly all of his recent work and, just like the hundreds of tiny images in the works, Rana gives us a myriad of perspectives on culture, visual perception and, ultimately, on life” (“A Moment in Time: Fragmentation and Reformulation in the Work of Rashid Rana”, Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010, pgs. 160-161). The complexities arising from Red Carpet 3 lay ground for discussing and introspecting on issues that transcend cultural specificities. In a dialogue with Christopher Mooney, Rana commented on his work, saying that it was “a three-way negotiation between myself, my immediate physical surroundings and what I receive – whether through the Internet, books, history or collective knowledge....Visual language can reach people but still retain its own accent. It can retain its own specificities, yet be transnational.” (“Rashid Rana”, ArtReview, accessed online on 11 Apr. 2014)

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