Important Notice

In the present lot, Rashid Rana has created a photographic montage portraying Shah Rukh Khan, one of the most recognised and admired stars of popular Indian cinema, or Bollywood. Like the other Bollywood actors that the artist has depicted in this series of works from 2004, Khan is idolized throughout South and West Asia as the paragon of masculinity and sexuality. Their posters are found in homes and shops all over cities like Rana’s native... In the present lot, Rashid Rana has created a photographic montage portraying Shah Rukh Khan, one of the most recognised and admired stars of popular Indian cinema, or Bollywood. Like the other Bollywood actors that the artist has depicted in this series of works from 2004, Khan is idolized throughout South and West Asia as the paragon of masculinity and sexuality. Their posters are found in homes and shops all over cities like Rana’s native Lahore, and their faces adorn larger-than-life billboards all over the subcontinent.

This series of works, however, is not about the star. Leaving visible cracks in his assembled images, Rana forces a shift in perspective from the macro to the micro, the global to the local. Titled Ommatidia, the collective term for the bio-structural components that hold together the multiple lenses of a fly’s compound eye, these works shift the viewer’s focus from the stars to the structures that support their heroic images. This portrait is composed of several thousand smaller images of ordinary Pakistani men, whose shared aspirations Rana believes uphold the entire industry. “Tiny documentary photographs taken in the chaotic streets of Lahore provide a wider picture of celebrity as figment; a mass media construct sustained by the projected, collective dreams and aspirations of ordinary Pakistani society as it jostles politically and culturally with neighbouring India” (Ulanda Blair, Flash, Center for Contemporary Photography, March-June 2007, p. 9).

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