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Lot 111

 

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Rashid Rana's art is primarily concerned with notions of dualities, and multiple perspectives. He often achieves this by clever juxtaposition, most evident in his photomosaic works where large images, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be composed of numerous smaller images. These works are "sometimes even heroic in scale, and they appear from a distance as slightly blurred, low-resolution renditions of banalities: landscapes, film... Rashid Rana's art is primarily concerned with notions of dualities, and multiple perspectives. He often achieves this by clever juxtaposition, most evident in his photomosaic works where large images, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be composed of numerous smaller images. These works are "sometimes even heroic in scale, and they appear from a distance as slightly blurred, low-resolution renditions of banalities: landscapes, film posters or press photographs. Drawing near, one realizes that the large and visible 'pixels' are themselves smaller photographs, which magically assemble to compose the larger image. To step near, and away, and near again, to see dark and light photographs becoming the pupil or the highlight in somebody's eye, is to experience marvellous visual complexity." (Quddus Mirza, Adnan Manani, Kavita Singh et al., Rashid Rana, Mumbai: Chatterjee & Lal and Chemould Prescott Road, 2010, p. 25)

Rana explored and experimented with painting, photography and video for almost a decade before arriving at his iconic photographic mosaic technique. He received his formal training in painting, including miniature painting, at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 1992, following which he left for the Massachusetts College of Art to pursue his MFA. During this decade, several neo-miniature artists in Pakistan were occupied with adapting Mughal era art techniques for a contemporary setting. The arts scene also concerned itself with popular culture, kitsch and broadcast imagery.

While Rana continued to make paintings, he began to foray into digital media and photography in the mid-1990s. He subsequently abandoned paint altogether and pursued his growing interest in digital technology, as well as that in the formation of grids and matrices, leading him to his breakthrough photographic mosaic, I Love Miniatures, in 2002. Featuring numerous tiny photographs of advertising billboards in Lahore arranged to resemble a Mughal Emperor's miniature style portrait, the work was, in some ways, a response to the popularity of Pakistan's neo-miniaturist culture. "My whole issue was that only something with an ethnic label was going to be recognized as Pakistani. I thought: if this is the way it's going to be I'm going to subvert the idea with what I want to say and do. So I showed them a miniature painting they wanted to see, and made it with the immediate visual culture of my city today. And that's how a journey of documenting paradoxes and dealing with duality started in this formal and conceptual device." (Artist quoted in "Rashid Rana's Pakistan: a mini-version of the globe," Radio Open Source, 19 September 2011, online)

In his Red Carpet series, of which the present lot is a part, thousands of miniscule photographs depicting the slaughter of goats are arranged to appear as if they are stunning Indo-Iranian carpets. With this juxtaposition, Red Carpet - 2 addresses several dualities besides that of beauty and death. As noted by Girish Shahane, "Rana's dialectical compositions hinge upon a series of binaries: time versus space; two dimensions versus three; conceptual versus political; wholeness versus fragmentation; handmade versus machinemade; abstraction versus Pop; and artifice versus illusionism, to enumerate the most persistent." (Quddus Mirza, Adnan Manani, Kavita Singh et al., p. 90)

Rana's works call for deep engagement from the viewer. "Meaning unfolds slowly, as the viewer recognizes the large image, then perceives the small ones, and then steps back to see the large image again, this time knowing how and of what it is composed. Inevitably, this extended encounter turns each image into a narrative; as the mind assimilates it, it constructs relationships between the constituent elements and the whole. 'This is appearance and this is reality'; 'this is the hidden truth that lies beneath this surface'; 'these are two lies and the truth lies elsewhere.' Fragments assemble meaning." (Quddus Mirza, Adnan Manani, Kavita Singh et al., p. 29)

This emotional transformation is not unlike the one experienced by the artist himself when he had visited the Lahore-based slaughterhouse that he photographed for Red Carpet - 2. While he had initially experienced horror and revulsion at the sight of blood and the butchered animal parts, he would get used to this with time and even feel relatively disengaged from his surroundings. According to Michael Hilsman, this points to how "there is no one all-encompassing emotional (or visual) definition for any subject... By forcing the viewer to relive the same time-based experience which Rana himself encountered inside the slaughterhouse, Rana begs the question: "Is there a difference between how the world looks and how it feels?" 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." (Quddus Mirza, Adnan Manani, Kavita Singh et al., p. 161)

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