Important Notice

In the present lot, Lahore-based artist Rashid Rana has employed digital photomontage to interrogate the ironies spawned by the developmental unevenness between the first and third worlds. This is achieved through the juxtaposition of architectural references.

The work came out of a site-specific piece that the artist executed for a United Kingdom museum. Here, Rana took a photo of the view through one of the museum's windows and... In the present lot, Lahore-based artist Rashid Rana has employed digital photomontage to interrogate the ironies spawned by the developmental unevenness between the first and third worlds. This is achieved through the juxtaposition of architectural references.

The work came out of a site-specific piece that the artist executed for a United Kingdom museum. Here, Rana took a photo of the view through one of the museum's windows and re-created it with the help of images of houses in Lahore, pasting the resulting work onto the same glass window through which he had first photographed the scene. This idea follows through in the macro image of the present lot, which is a view of the Manhattan skyline through the reflection of another tall glass building. At the same time the overlay of the word 'Stock Photo' brings to mind image-bank websites from the West, which sell photographic images, and the work's title 'Copyright Violation of a Stock Photo' both subverts and sets up an ironic position toward the choice of image.

The illusions built into the two-dimensional plane of this work are carried forward into the third dimension by the artist's act of spreading the work onto three walls. Depending on the viewer's vantage point the work will present a variety of impressions.

"In all these works, 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." (Kavita Singh, "Meaning, in its Fragments", Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2010, p. 29, 30).

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