Important Notice

In the present lot, Rashid Rana uses a photographic montage of Hrithik Roshan, a widely recognised Bollywood star, to comment on the social construction of celebrity and the role of fantasy. Like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan, the other actors that the artist has depicted in the series that this work is drawn from, Roshan is idolized throughout Asia and the Middle East as a superhero – the epitome of masculinity. Posters of his films are found... In the present lot, Rashid Rana uses a photographic montage of Hrithik Roshan, a widely recognised Bollywood star, to comment on the social construction of celebrity and the role of fantasy. Like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan, the other actors that the artist has depicted in the series that this work is drawn from, Roshan is idolized throughout Asia and the Middle East as a superhero – the epitome of masculinity. Posters of his films are found decorating walls in almost every South Asian city, including the artist’s native Lahore, and his face adorns several larger-than-life billboards all over the subcontinent.

Titled Ommatidia, the collective term for the bio-structural components that hold together the multiple lenses of a fly’s compound eye, this series of works shifts the viewer’s focus from the idol to the structures that construct and support his heroic image, literally as well as metaphorically. Composed of several thousand photographs of ordinary Pakistani men taken on the streets of Lahore, these photomontage portraits probe the collective consciousness that creates and upholds celebrity. "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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