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Rashid Rana’s stainless
steel-and-photo-based
installation, Desperately Seeking Paradise II, is the showstopper of his ambitious new exhibition in Mumbai; (above) from a distance you see towering skyscrapers
but a closer inspection
reveals a mosaic of images
of ordinary buildings
photographed in Lahore |
At first glance, all you see is yourself reflected in the imposing stainless steel cube. Step back a little and suddenly a panoramic cityscape of towering skyscrapers emerges before your eyes. But move in closer and be prepared for a surprise — close up you are looking at thousands of tiny images of ordinary-looking homes and buildings across Lahore. Together they all merge seamlessly to create the larger image of the skyscrapers.
This photo-based installation is called Desperately Seeking Paradise II and it’s a typically brilliant creation by Pakistan’s leading Contemporary artist Rashid Rana. Rana’s among the top stars of the Contemporary South Asian art space and he’s ranked up there along with Indian artists like Subodh Gupta and Jitish Kallat in the international art world.
Now, he’s back mesmerising his many fans and collectors in India with his latest show Apposite/ Opposite at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road and Chatterjee & Lal galleries. The two-gallery show is his fourth in India — he last showed here in 2007 — but it’s his most ambitious yet featuring nearly 30 works made over the last three years. It’s a mix of giant works and also smaller ones.
Says Rana: “I think this show does justice to the love and recognition that I’ve got from the Indian art world.”
“There are some artists who constantly re-invent themselves and Rashid is one of them,” adds Shireen Gandhy of Chemould Prescott Road.
Certainly, Rana has been moving in different directions and creating ever more ambitious images. Rana is known for his distinctive photo-mosaic works where he creates a macro image out of thousands of micro images or tiny photographs. In his famous Red Carpet series, for instance, you first saw a red carpet — but it was actually made out of tiny images from a slaughterhouse.
So in Mumbai, Rana has works that showcase at least four new “tracks” that he says “have opened up over the last couple of years”. There’s the large installation, Desperately Seeking Paradise II — the Mumbai edition of the work was fabricated in Pune incidentally. Then, there are what are called photo-sculptures like Books and even photo-mosaic videos (where a video is made and then sliced up to create entirely different images).
Of course, Rana’s key themes are still duality, globalisation, identity and representation. Mortimer Chatterjee, partner, Chatterjee & Lal, says: “Rashid is able to simultaneously function at an extremely cerebral level even as his work has a mass visual appeal.”
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| Rana’s new photo-mosaics like Language V are more layered and nuanced; (above) texts from banners and shop-signs in Lahore form the micro-images of the Language Series |
And Pakistani artist and critic Quddus Mirza says: “In a post-modern world, where the boundaries between the physical and virtual are blurring, Rashid’s work really responds to aspects of our times. That I feel is the key to his success.”
The visual references in Rana’s work range from art history to pop culture. Mirza has said in one critical essay that: “Multiple visuals derived from diverse sources, in mosaic-like settings, present complex views that, if decoded, relate to our scattered, shattered world.”
Rana’s excited by the direction he’s been moving in the last few years. At one level, he has done several solo shows including at the Musee Guimet in Paris in 2010 and at Lisson Gallery, London, and also Cornerhouse, Manchester, last year.
Also, he feels that his photo-mosaics, have become more layered compared to the direct contrasts of earlier. Says Rana: “My photo-mosaic work has evolved in that it’s no longer just about having contradictory things co-existing. I’m still interested in multiple realities but it has taken a slightly different angle now.”
So at one layer, his recent Language Series photo-mosaics seem like abstract works. Yet, he’s also referring to iconic paintings from Western art history at another layer. And the micro-images are all texts — shop-signs, banners, graffiti — drawn from Lahore.
His other new direction is evident in his videos, where Rana’s extended his photo-mosaics “into a time-based medium”. In Anatomy Lesson 1, for instance, he shot staged footage of Punjabi wrestlers. He then cut the video into 1,256 pieces, each of which is also a moving image, and reassembled these pieces to resemble a carnal act.
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Rana’s milestone works include Dis-
Location 1, and Red Carpet (above),
which was composed of images of
a slaughterhouse |
Duality is a key motif in Rana’s work. “The world has shrunk so much, yet it remains very uneven at various economic, social and political levels. And the contrast feels heightened because everybody can see everyone. I’m interested in this,” he says.
Chatterjee says: “Rashid’s almost like a radar. He soaks up information and visuals around him and then you can see the manner in which it comes out as a cacophony of stimuli that he’s filtered in his own way.”
Adds Gandhy: “Digital technology is his medium and he really uses it to its optimum level. Even in an installation like Desperately Seeking Paradise, there are so many complexities of material, optics, physics and engineering at play. Only when it is finally produced does he really get to see how the work was originally conceived, which really gives one an insight of his intelligence.”
At the core of Rana’s work is, of course, his formal concern with two-dimensionality as a painter. This dates back to the early 1990s, when he began making deceptively abstract paintings of grids.
“My fascination with two-dimension is the basic fuel for my practice. Flatness or two dimensionality does not exist in nature. I find it fascinating to see how different people have negotiated with it to create an image on a flat surface,” says Rana, who like most Pakistani artists, also teaches art.
Yet he also admits that: “For the last 10 years, I’ve purposely made my work very easy to relate to at first sight. If there’s any deeper content, it can come later. I use issues to entice the viewer but my hope is that my work is not about issues but about the language itself.”
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| Rana’s solo show at Musee Guimet in
Paris in 2010 included works like What Lies Between Flesh and Blood 3; (above) the seemingly serene abstract is actually
composed of tiny images of blood and skin |
Rana, who Gandhy says is “detail-obsessed”, actually became an artist by accident. As the youngest child of five siblings, “I could get away with many things”, he recalls. His parents migrated from Ambala to Lahore after Partition. His father was in the police force and always emphasised “the value of education”. “I come from a lower middle-class family which moved to the middle-class within a generation. My brother worked overseas so it was the usual sub- continent story,” he says.
But while Rana was good at drawing and maths, “I didn’t know art could be a profession”, he says. Instead, he thought he’d become an engineer but he missed a deadline to study computer electronics abroad. “I had four months to kill during which I discovered that there was an art school in Lahore which offered an architecture degree. Since it sounded like engineering yet seemed more creative, I felt I should do this,” he recalls.
He got admission in the fine arts programme though. After his first year, he decided art was “what I am best at”.
At the National College of Art, he found a mentor in the great Pakistani painter Zahoor ul-Akhlaq. And in 1992 Rana moved to Boston where he did a Master’s degree. It provided great exposure but “it was also a struggle because most of the faculty didn’t know where I was coming from”, he says.
So he returned to Pakistan in 1995. For the first three years, though, Rana devoted his energy primarily to teaching. “People don’t realise that I’ve given more hours to teaching than to my art-making,” he says. Yet, he admits that it also feeds his art. “What’s the point of living in Pakistan if I don’t have a real life, a job to go to and interact with people. Otherwise, I’d be shut in my studio leading an artificial life,” says Rana, who currently teaches, along with his wife Aroosa, at Beaconhouse National University.
Back in the mid-1990s, though, he was the bohemian “new wave teacher”. That transitional phase also laid the foundation of his approach of not having “any hard divide between the formal and conceptual, the public and personal, the emotional and intellectual”. “I wanted all of these to come into play,” he says.
By 1999, he began working on his first solo show, Non-Sense, held in 2000, where he made large paintings referencing popular culture. But the breakthrough came with his first photo-mosaic I Love Miniatures in 2002. Reacting against the neo-miniature wave in 1990s Pakistan, Rana made a digital miniature of Shah Jahan, except that it comprised billboard images from all around Lahore.
There’s been no looking back since. In 2004, he held his first solo show outside Pakistan, at Nature Morte gallery in Delhi, which propelled him further into the international art world. And he’s done major works ever since from A Day in the Life of Landscape and All Eyes Skywards during the Annual Parade to the popular Veil, Red Carpets, Dis-Location, and Offshore Accounts series and even site-specific works like See Through.
Now, his Mumbai show — his large works are typically priced upwards of Rs 30 lakh — is already eliciting a big response. His early collectors include Anupam Poddar and also Charles Saatchi and Frank Cohen abroad. Besides, his work is also in the Fukuoka Museum, Japan, and the British Museum, London.
Coming up next is a large show of his works at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Pakistan in September. Besides, Rana’s also working on a commissioned project for Louis Vuitton. But through all this, he’s already planning his next big artistic leap. He says: “My wish is to do something very fresh after that. I’m in the mood to make works that are very personal, that may be more subtle. But that’s the beauty of art, you can’t predict your work, it constantly suprises you.”
Image courtesy Rashid Rana and
Chemould Prescott Road |
