Important Notice

Although his formal training is in painting, over the last few years, Rashid Rana has experimented with the flexibility of new media like photography, video and installation in the development of his distinctive artistic vocabulary. The present lot, a digital photomontage, comprises thousands of minute images of signboards, brand logos and movie posters from the streets of present day Pakistan, arranged in such a way that together they compose a... Although his formal training is in painting, over the last few years, Rashid Rana has experimented with the flexibility of new media like photography, video and installation in the development of his distinctive artistic vocabulary. The present lot, a digital photomontage, comprises thousands of minute images of signboards, brand logos and movie posters from the streets of present day Pakistan, arranged in such a way that together they compose a striking and entirely different image of an intricate Mughal archway.

The relationship between the almost iridescent larger image and its numerous darker, more commercial constituents is a contradictory one, simultaneously giving voice to ideas of cultural consonance and dissonance, past and present, stagnation and change. According to art historian Kavita Singh, “Chosen with acid wit, the smaller images generally subvert or at least complicate the larger image they help to create.” In the joints of such assemblages, then, Rana creates a space in which a dialogue between the oppositional ideals represented by the images may begin. Singh explains, “The temporal lag between the perception of the overall image and its constituent parts necessarily sets up a narrative between them. One is left then to meditate on the levels of meaning in the relationship between the part and the whole. Is it a relationship of an edifice and its support? A public statement and an unspoken truth? Self and Other? Self and Self? Meanings shift continually” (“Between the Part and the Whole”, Rashid Rana: Identical Views, Nature Morte, New Delhi, Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, and Bose Pacia, New York, exhibition catalogue, 2004-05, p. 22).

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