Important Notice

Inspired by the city of Lahore, where he was born and raised, Rashid Rana employs his composite photo-collages to interrogate the ironies and juxtapositions spawned by urbanization, globalization, and the heavy cross-border flows of people, products and ideas that they result in. Portraying progress and development as bittersweet, the artist draws on the miniature painting traditions of South Asia to grapple with contemporary social disparities... Inspired by the city of Lahore, where he was born and raised, Rashid Rana employs his composite photo-collages to interrogate the ironies and juxtapositions spawned by urbanization, globalization, and the heavy cross-border flows of people, products and ideas that they result in. Portraying progress and development as bittersweet, the artist draws on the miniature painting traditions of South Asia to grapple with contemporary social disparities in his work.

“Rashid Rana is a master of addressing political and social issues through ironic juxtapositions. His works vacillate between the micro and the macro as he creates composite image arranged from thousands of ‘pixels’ or miniaturized photos, often depicting mundane scenes of life in his city of Lahore. In his work, Rana cleverly relates back to the history of art in Pakistan, his native country…in spite of his embrace of new media, Rana manages to wryly preserve the idea of the miniature in his work through his mosaic-like use of minute photographs in constructing his mural-size images… Rana’s ability to identify and exploit…tensions between the whole and its parts in his pointillist photographs has become his hallmark. The artist is adept at pulling apart the world’s facades, forcing his viewers to looks beyond the larger image and to the sum of its parts. In so doing, Rana reveals a litany of cultural, political and economic ills lying just beneath the surface of the carefully constructed representations we have come to accept as ‘reality’” (Peter Nagy and Veronica Collins, The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, Phillips de Pury & Company and Nature Morte exhibition catalogue, London, 2008, not paginated).

Built on contrasts in scale, the present lot, part of Rana’s Dis-Location series of works, is a critical comment on the transformation of culture and the notion that tradition is not static. “His decision to photograph an ordinary street of Lahore, with its nondescript structures, reflects the artist’s concerns about the matter of random choices and conscious selection. Simultaneously the composition of smaller views into a big sepia-like print invokes the idea of tradition – how tradition itself is subject to change. Numerous views of one venue, recently shot in multiple sequences, when joined in a grid remind us of old picture postcards. Consequently in the ‘Dislocation Series’ the whole question of present, of past, of contemporary and conventional is thoroughly prodded and poked through the idea of paradox” (Art HK 08, Chemould Prescott Road website, accessed February 2009).

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