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A RETURN TO THE REAL...
Rashid Rana: A return to the real
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Rashid Rana: A return to the real
— Rajesh Punj
As a London based art critic, correspondent and freelance curator, I have for several years now been writing more exclusively on the emerging markets; (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and the Middle East ), contributing articles, catalogue essays and interviewing artists for gallerists and publications with a specialist interest in the new geographies of art. India, China and the Middle East are at the vanguard of this new cultural zeitgeist; less well known is what is coming out of Pakistan and Bangladesh right now. A leading exponent of the Pakistani art scene is the artist and intellectual Rashid Rana. Based in Lahore, working in Karachi, with a gallerist in London and New Delhi, Rana epitomises the global reach of his new kind of visual aesthetic; and significantly, despite the damaging politics and ever-present social uncertainty, Pakistan like Iran, is in the grip of a proliferation of contemporary art practices or counter-cultural activities. In London, promoting a forthcoming solo show at Lisson gallery and a year-long museum exhibition in Karachi, Rashid Rana has very easily adapted to the globalism of his appeal. Here and now, our coming together provides a rare opportunity to reflect upon his work, as a survey of his maturing ideas and influences. Significantly what transpires is that rather than laying down the principles for a new art practice, Rana is already deeply enmeshed in a post-modernist approach, that is becoming the prevalent language of those artists emerging from the new markets; all jostling for an international position on a global platform. Based in Lahore and in no way an ambassador for Pakistan, Rana is at ease discussing his work in relation to his own reinterpretation of existing works of Western art. Conclusively, it appears that art for Rana has gained a greater global value that out-weighs any responsibility it might have to cultural location, as Indian photographer Dayanita Singh expounded very recently when she explained her growing angst in respect to ‘the world focusing on Indian art, but more on the Indian than the art’ (Spence, 2013). The 2011 Asian Triennial Manchester drew on forty artists from thirteen Asian countries in an event that sought to highlight how Asian artists are 114
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actively and proficiently seeking to engage with new audiences. Significantly for the ATM curatorial council they were artists whose interests and aesthetic preoccupations mirrored much of what was happening in the UK. The presentation of these new works of art involved integrating then into the locations and venues already sited for contemporary theatre, art and performative practice. In this way the viewer would perceive the influence of each art or media form upon the others. Given Rashid Rana’s signature binary approach he was a hugely appropriate choice of artist for ATM11 as someone who has intelligently sought to introduce new visual experiences through our appreciation of the visual imagery of existing art history, and thus challenging our understanding of such imagery. Thus a week after the opening of the second Triennial in Manchester and days before the opening of Frieze in Regent’s Park, I met Rashid Rana in London, before he returned to Lahore and then onto Karachi. Arriving early and he arriving later, Rana and I eased into a conversation about his studio time, his many work commitments, and his indecision as to whether to stay in Lahore or reposition himself in London with the Lisson gallery to which he is now firmly affiliated. His association with Lisson was a coup for Rashid Rana and it occurred right about the time of his inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s EMPIRE STRIKES BACK exhibition in London in January 2010. This is when Rana was invited to exhibit alongside such artists as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Jitish Kallat and TV Santhosh and, given Charles Saatchi’s rather idiosyncratic belief that everything was ‘made in India’, Rana was deservedly horse-horned into a show in which all artists were predominant. Here, it is important to note Charles Saatchi’s appreciation of artistic works which irrespective of geography, dismantle boundaries and associated identities and allow art to be inclusive and self-explanatory. In the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Rana was able to benefit from this approach. Rana sees some kinds of politics as a little tiresome; he doesn’t wish to dwell on his nationality and neither does he wish to discuss his Indianness or the lack of it. ‘I am not denying the specific nature of my multiple identity, (being international is one of them), and I do let them come into play in my work, but I never feel obligated to have to make works about my identity per se’ (Rana, 2011). However, Rana acknowledges that India and Delhi were where he first held a major exhibition, showing with Nature Morte, New Delhi in 2004 and, moreover, that for the time being it is understandable that India’s contemporary art scene is more sophisticated and much more robust in relation to international interests than Pakistan’s art scene. In a memorable conversation with the then head of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern and South Asian Art at Bonham’s auction house, Mehreen Rizvi Khursheed, I drew her into discussing the cultural differences between India and Pakistan. In Khursheed’s view any such differences provide the flesh that layers everything Rashid Rana has come to represent. Yet tellingly for Rana, entrenched in such circumstances, it is only when he lets go of all the politics, ( the social commentary and geographical ills), that he truly becomes an inspired voice of reason. For Rana identity politics and political commentary hold much of contemporary art to ransom and for him the enlightened moment comes when managing Rashid Rana: A return to the real
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to move away from such drama and closer to something more reductive: namely, where his works are preoccupied with the material process itself. It might be argued, then, that Rana is a Pakistani artist pursuing minimal abstraction in a country dedicated to decorative realism. With Rashid Rana there is a distinct verbal exchange that develops when in his company. It begins with him talking to you very proficiently about his works. Then, once he has your attention, he eloquently envelops your imagination with technical and visual references. As a consequence, Rana appears as proficient with art history as he is with new technologies— referring, for example, to German abstractionist Gerhard Richter, Collagist Kurt Schwitters, French conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and his compatriot Yves Klein with a versatility that positively illuminates his conceptual works. And by unpacking his accomplished portfolio I am at liberty to consider how Rana has effectively moved away from those tired and tested conversations about identity and territory and deals, instead, with all those abstracted isms that are entirely in keeping with contemporary aesthetics. Conceiving of works that are wonderfully intricate for the constitution of their parts, Rana’s billboard styled images read like documentary photographs that rest on the eye reassuringly. Yet his ambition for seeing everything in the round, (from all perspectives), thinking as French painter Georg Braque had done with his early inventiveness for Cubism, Rana’s works are far more detailed and destabilising than at first they might appear. Revealing compositions of multiple narratives that deal in the fragile infusion of social detritus and natural beauty, Rana’s works appear as rich spectacles. The paradox for Rashid Rana is that he appears to engage with modern technologies with such verve and vigour that you might be fooled into believing he is a technocrat, when in fact he wishes to slow everything down, reduce everything to its simplest form and to make three dimensional reality a two dimensional folly. Essentially, in so doing, he critiques our engaging faith with modernity. When discussing his practice Rana would go as far as to say, ‘that there is not a hierarchy of mediums, that multimedia is more progressive than photo-works or that photos are more credible, more contemporary than painting’ ( 2011) . But I do recall that in our discussion, while explaining photo-sculptures, I spoke about the ‘limitation of a photo image’, and how it became not a limitation but a subject, a theme for these works instead. Therefore, it could well be suggested that there is, instead, a democratic palette that furnishes his practice and inform Rana’s works. Having just returned from Manchester where he was head-hunted for the Triennial, Rana discussed the event as a major coup for the city and for its cultural institutions. He cited his current exhibition at Cornerhouse, Manchester, as one of his most important and for which he provided much of his contemporary collection for display. Uprooting his works from Lahore and London, Rana, without reservation, sought to introduce key works from his collection to a new audience, and in so doing to give the Triennial a global perspective.
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Showing previously at Nature Morte, New Delhi, the Asian Art Biennial at the National Fine Arts Museum, Taichung, Taiwan, and Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, among others, and with works at Frieze Art Fair, in October 2011, Rana has rightly cemented his place among the leading international contenders. Opening and reopening files from his well-ordered desktop, Rana stresses that his Cornerhouse exhibition is divided into three main themes and he leads me through a well-rehearsed PowerPoint display that explains the themes and their associated ideas as though this were a new thread of advanced algebra. EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING AT ONCE is an incredibly neat show, in which the artist’s works sit and stand in a very orderly fashion, holding to the wall and floor like original Donald Judd sculptures since all of Rana’s pieces formally exist in space without any odour, sound spillage or colour stains. Yet for all their precision, and on deeper inspection, one finds a deeper residual mess about these works. Borrowing very selectively from the canons of sex, violence and the powerful demolition of our lives, using overlapping imagery from pornography, television, slaughter houses and the internet, Rana’s colour images are constructed as perfectly pixelated works and, in so doing, Rana introduces a new audience to an elemental sensation of ‘dis-location’. For Rana, the exhibition at Cornerhouse Manchester is very recent and there were many new works in it from his repertoire, for instance the Language Series and the video mosaic Anatomy Lessons. He observed that:
I see most of these works as the beginnings of new explorations and not a time to depart from them. Therefore, I have continued working with both the ‘Language Series’ and ‘Anatomy Lessons Series’ since then, which has resulted in a very large scale video mosaic work that was shown as a special Lisson project at the India Art Fair in January of this year. Similarly, the Language Series has now developed in a direction that I am deliberately expanding on in a library of thousands of images of text from all over the city of Lahore, by looking at it as more archival material and not just as images of certain categories to form a large mosaic image. ( Rana, 2011 )
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For Rana the Language Series amounts to an expanding lexicon of language types, both visual and word-based, that are rooted in Urdu and they are present in more universal phrases that are in visual in Pakistan but are expropriated from the West. It is the interplay of his selective use of those ‘visual tiles’ that make for a densely engaging mosaic landscape. Moreover, unlike the earlier works in the series, the new works bring forth more diverse art historical references. Specifically, Rashid Rana began his Manchester show with works that wrestle with notions of two and three dimensionality. When given to discussing
Figure 18. Rashid Rana, Dis-Location I, 2007. C-print and DIASEC; 294.6×223.5cm. Courtesy of the artist and Art & Public Gallery, Geneva.
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one of his favoured works, Dis-location I ( 2007 ) , Rana explored a sizable image depicting one building over the course of some twenty-four hours ( Fig. 18 ) . The work is made up of multiple photo-images taken over the course of one calendar day, as morning becomes afternoon, which turns to evening and falls to the dead of night, returning to the morning again, thus forming a complete day. Rana stressed that nothing particularly interesting happens in that time (as if he might have witnessed an act of violence in the city) but then nothing is actually supposed to happen. Dis-location I deals in our perceived notions of reality and of what is real. Tellingly, as a troubling anecdote, Rana divulges that weeks after the work
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was completed a make-shift device went off close to a military building, some yards away. The World is Not Enough (2006 -2007 ) is a work that has quickly become part of Rana’s signature style ( Fig. 19 ) . A vast digital image of trash from a landfill site is photographed, pressed and presented, resembling a sophisticated landscape in which the relentless undulations of rubbish and rotting detritus act as the ebb and flow of untilled portions of land. I cannot help but feel that there is something incredibly tragic as well as mesmerising about this work. The World is Not Enough reads like an impossible image of immense beauty, comprising of Rana’s laboured accumulation of detailed photographs of social waste, taken from a landfill site outside Lahore. Reduced to miniature pixels of information, the vast undulating sea is in fact hundreds of images of trash digitally ‘stitched’ into an aerial view that bears an uncanny resemblance to the stylised canvases of post-war American abstract expressionism. Here, as elsewhere in the artist’s work, the juxtaposition of beauty and the macabre forces the viewer into an acknowledgement of the complex politics of the piece. A work that appears on one level to represent a notion of ideal beauty is, in fact, based on a more troubling examination of the increasing detritus and decay of the city. For Rana, his unpicking of such jarring contradictions expounds something of the social and cultural contradiction that is intrinsic to Pakistan. Here, art can become one among many suitable vehicles for cathartic change in contrast to the unruly and irrational politics of the day. Turning to sculpture in Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase (2007 ), Rana takes a fundamental form from art history, a still life, and seeks to technically remonstrate with its molecular structure ( Fig. 20 ) . For a Western audience a stable symbol of modern representation, ‘flowers in a vase’, have been rendered as a benchmark for modern aesthetics time immemorial.
Figure 19. Rashid Rana, detail The World Is Not Enough, 2006-2007. C-print and DIASEC; 294.6×221cm. Cour tesy of the artist and CC Ar t Limited, Jersey.
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Figure 20. Rashid Rana, Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase, 2010. UV print on aluminium; 30.5×30.5×45.7cm each. Cour tesy of the ar tist, Gallery Chemould and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai.
Shown at the Musée Guimet, Paris, in 2010, Plastic Flowers in a Traditional Vase ( 2007 ) , along with twenty-seven other works, was curated into an existing display of Asian antiquities in which contemporary works sat side-by-side with ancient artefacts, Buddha statuettes, effigies of revered deities and symbolist imagery. The display also included Rana’s striking digital photomontages, sculptures and pixilated works, dating back to 1992. Rana’s works were interspersed into five thematic sections: ‘The Idea of Abstract’, ‘Transcending Tradition’, ‘Real Time, Other Spaces’, ‘Between Flesh and Blood’, and ‘Self in Other’ and effectively drew on his relationship between East and West. In reference to Rana’s exhibition at the Musée Guimet, president, Jacques Giès, defined the temporary arrangement as an opportunity for the museum to become ‘much more than a safety-deposit box for antiques’ (cited in Falvo, 2010). Moreover, independent curator, Rosa Maria Falvo went on to claim that ‘Rashid Rana is one of those rare artists, who have developed a unique synthesis between Western rationality and an Eastern world view; having been trained and living and working in both realities. He communicates in what Quddus Mirza calls “a global language … with a particular accent”’ (Falvo, 2010). Indeed, Rana’s ability to translate his interpretative view to a new audience set the agenda for the ATM as he successfully represented a seamless homology between his visual take on reality in Pakistan and its relationship to a Western cannon. Such leading solo shows confirm Rana’s transition from group show artist to a leading protagonist in his own right. ‘Since 2010, I am getting
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opportunities to have solo shows at public institutions, public solo show at Muse Guimet, Paris; Cornerhouse, Manchester; New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Pao Galleries, Hong Kong. These shows, with a favour of a survey show, have provided me with an opportunity to see my practice in retrospect and be more analytical about, and therefore instrumental in, developing my practice further’ (Rana, 2011 ). Such independence has drawn Rana back to Lahore for a major museum show that, for him, clearly defines his significance as a leading Pakistani artist, whilst his reputation abroad soars.
The survey exhibition, (more like a mid-career retrospective), will open in early September 2012 and will continue for at least nine months in Karachi. This show brings together around sixty works of mine, from throughout my career, for an audience in Pakistan who are interested in seeing my journey and being informed of my practice in recent years. Since I started my artistic journey as a painter and then my practice evolved from painting to idea-led works that rely heavily on the use of tools of new media. ( Rana, 2011) This survey show is intended to help an audience in Pakistan to find connections between Pakistani modernists and most recent developments in contemporary art from Pakistan. With this substantial show in the offing, Rana effectively wishes to reintroduce himself back into Pakistani culture. Having acquired his rubric in India and Europe, Rana returns as an accomplished practitioner, positioning himself as a leading contemporary artist of the modern era. Borrowing effectively from Western art history, Rana is just as resourceful in subverting our preconceived notions of Eastern aesthetics. His works Red Carpet I 2007 takes as its motif a red carpet, pixilated, digitised, sealed into a skin of Perspex and aluminium and shattered into a mosaic montage and as such the carpet effectively loses all of its credible characteristics (Fig. 21). Thus, by forensically examining the actual make-up of something so historically and socially compounded into a culture as a carpet, Rana transforms it another context and it becomes something else entirely. This emblematic piece of cultural heritage, effectively reproduced for a modern audience, is here redesigned as a ‘total’ image. Yet an image that has multiple possibilities, appearing not only as a decorative reproduction of a red carpet but also a pixilated vision of violence; with scenes of blood on marble floors, the macabre slicing of animals in slaughter-houses and open body wounds beside the proliferation of prostitution and porn. Such minuscule snap-shots of such affecting Rashid Rana: A return to the real
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Figure 21. Rashid Rana, Red Carpet I, 2007. C-print and DIASEC; 294.6Ă—221 cm. Cour tesy of the ar tist and Pallak Seth Collection.
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imagery are repeated over and over again within a mosaic framework. Where light and dark reds are drawn together as the detail for the thread and detailed pattern of a carpet they prove incredibly unsettling for its residual decoration. This duality really does challenge our sense of what constitutes beauty in a manner that is unlike an abrasive film or photograph, while, in context, the works appear positively charming as they adorn the walls of the Cornerhouse gallery. Yet the strength of Rana’s work lies in the fact that beneath the allure of these works, the conscious effort for a minimal display provides a thoroughly dreadful synopsis of the routine tragedy of living in Pakistan. Significantly for Rana, his will to seek beauty in such macabre settings gives a licence to the artist to enhance a Western audience’s understanding of violence. Moreover, the sheer distance between its location and our experience of it enables Rana to suggest that we are more readily attuned to visual art than violence. Figure 22. Rashid Rana, detail Veil VI, 2007. C-print and DIASEC; 177.8×130.6cm. Cour tesy of the ar tist and Pierre Huber, Switzerland.
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Veil VI 2007 is a work we had spoken about previously but nonetheless it draws me in like a bee rooting for pollen ( Fig. 22 ) . It offers a striking image of figures dressed in sand coloured burqas pressed up against the Perspex, all reluctantly photographed. This image is another of Rana’s
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pixilated works that is startling for its imbued complexity. Suggesting that nothing is as it appears to be, Rana arrives at this image by drawing on hundreds of smaller, macro images of women in extreme phonographic positions; wrestling with their own flesh, as they attempt to arouse their audience while each of these contoured forms make up the larger image of the burqas of the women. Such unparalleled contradictions make for another unsettling work that goes much further than his previous work in challenging notions of the prescribed place, the role, and the social significance of women in modern Islamic society. With this work Rashid Rana critiques cultural constructs, whether in relation to the sexual objectification of women through his use of pornographic imagery, or in relation to how the burqa is perceived as a political symbol in a post 9/11 era. By using both these representations of gender in a rigid manner, Rana is effectively destroying them both, forcing the viewer to look beyond them and critique the so-called machinery of truth from which they are born. What Lies Between Flesh and Blood Series 2009 is a work that returns us to the brilliance with which Rana is able to borrow very freely from modern art history in order to make a new work of incredible majesty (Fig. 23). What does Rana have to say concerning his relationship to art history? Of his visually engagement with the Western canon, and its influence upon his practice?
I love referring to art history in my work. There is a lot that has been preserved, documented and written on the Western history of art and therefore that is what I was exposed to mostly as an art student in Pakistan. Therefore, it is part of me and I consider it as a collective and shared knowledge; I often respond to it in my practice. At the broader level, my practice is a combination and negotiation between two kinds of experience; that of immediate physical surroundings (not to be confused with Pakistan or national identity) and the experience of information that one receives through remote means, be it through news-media, the internet or books in the form of international news, information about global visual culture or popular culture and art history. Both kinds of experience are equally valid and inform my practice. In more specific terms, my relationship to the canon of Western art history and the subversive approach to it is neither purely a critique of it and nor a pure celebration. ( Rana, 2011 ) Rashid Rana: A return to the real
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Rana adjusts himself and leans back as he points to an image of a Mark Rothko styled work that again appears pixilated and fleetingly resembles something of a Dulux coloured wall chart. However, this is a much more significant thing that we are dealing with here— a work that goes from floor to ceiling: it is Rana’s take on one of Mark Rothko’s seminal works from the 1960s (colour field canvases reflected Rothko’s tormented state in a whole series of abstracted works that climaxed in a series of red and black works). For Rana, America’s Mark Rothko, Carl Andre and Andy Warhol, whom he eloquently recalls when referring to other works in the series, epitomise the vanguard figures of modern art history and he regards them as the human threads for his examination of modern Western aesthetics. For an outsider looking in, they prove to be the beginning point from which he appropriated a new series of two-dimensional works. Not intimidated in the slightest by the originals, Rana appears to look upon the works as postcard images that require readdressing from a new perspective and for a new audience and, as such, his works are redefining. Each small tile is made up of infected skin, open wounds, cuts, bruises, bullet wounds to the body which collectively turn the stomach, and, for Rana, such collected afflictions suggest something of the real suffering that exists in Pakistan and the rest of the world. This is as external for Rana as it was internal for American Mark Rothko. Where Rothko referred to his own torments and tragedies in layers of abstracted paint, Rana appears to examine tyranny and private tragedy with a forensic magnifying glass. For Rana, the objective in using such defining references is about tilting our view of the world slightly in order that we understand something from an alternative perspective. He eloquently explained that:
Figure 23. Rashid Rana, What Lies Between Flesh and Blood II, 2009. C-print and DIASEC; 180.3×204.4cm. Courtesy of the ar tist and Erik Wiger tz Collection.
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puzzling the audience is not the main objective; it’s more to do with taking fragments to create something very familiar. But when one looks at both the bigger and smaller picture together, it is then that preconceived notions about certain phenomena are challenged. Then they (the audience) make new connections and a meaning through very familiar imagery. The aim is to make the viewer challenge stereotypes. ( Rana, 2011 ) All of this leads us to his final theme—the strength of his entire show. As he finished his water and reached for one of the small bottles on the table of the viewing room, he introduced the weighty notion of ‘abstraction’, which, along with ‘pixilation’, rolled off his tongue like perverse new buzz words—and they are at the centre of many of Rana’s seminal works. Rana runs through new works that are technically astounding and then, quite unexpectedly, stops at a drawing which is incomplete in comparison to his more accomplished contemporary works. It proves utterly engaging in its significance and startling for its date. Untitled I 1992-1993 is a small, unobtrusive canvas, upon which Rana has scored out a set of lines that are both horizontal and vertical—a matrix of black chalk lines on a notebook-size canvas ( Fig. 24 ) . This work, he declares, was influenced by his teacher, the legendary artist Zahoor ul Akhlaq who originally exposed the young impressionable Rana to more liberal notions outside of decorative representation.
Figure 24. Rashid Rana, Untitled I, 1992. 30.48×22.86cm. Cour tesy of the ar tist and Faiza Butt.
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Incredibly radical at the time, Rana was encouraged to engage with Western notions of abstraction, modernity and minimalism—as approaches to picture making—and for Rana minimalism draws him to a significant place in his work. He declared: ‘I always prefer to have my work have a simple outlook without reducing the complexity of content and I hope to continue with the same; perhaps even more complex in content and even simpler in its appearance. One recent work, A Plinth from a Gallery, in Lahore is perhaps the best example of that’ (Rana, 2011).
Figure 25. Rashid Rana, Two-Dimensions, 2007. C-print and DIASEC; 114.3×194.3cm. Courtesy of the ar tist, Gallery Chemould, and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai.
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I recall returning to the Cornerhouse gallery space and making for the small canvas, brushing past the more impressive works of aluminium and Perspex, and coming to rest like a devotional cat beside Untitled I. I looked over and over at its depilated visual configurations for something of the original eureka moment that Rana eloquently cited in our recent conversation. And in all the loose hatched lines on the canvas I saw a quiet revolution taking place for the artist, as he ultimately rejected formal representation, that is at the root of Pakistani art, and sought instead to look for a more Western interpretation of reality, in which minimalism comes to the fore.
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In Two-Dimensions 2007, Rana produced a work that recalled the face of one of the twin towers. Rising up through the work, it wrestles with notions of hyper-modernity and sensational terrorism and again the image is made up of smaller pixilations of cityscapes from Lahore ( Fig. 25) . Desperately Seeking Paradise II 2010-2011 is possibly the largest work at the Cornerhouse and was previously on display at the Lisson Gallery, London. It is pinned into the corner of the upper floor of the gallery as two walls jut out as a metallic installation and its materials are substantial ( Fig. 26 ) . Rana appears to have laboured over this work, as its technical qualities are impressive. Walking towards Desperately Seeking Paradise II, turning its corner and examining it for all its details, there are multiple works here that change the complexion of the entire piece. For Rana, scale is a litmus test for the durability of an idea. He explained:
I believe that scale is a very important aspect and context of one’s work. I have always worked in either very large or small scale; very intimate or very intimidating. In recent years, I have made many more large-scale works than small, simply because large scale has been the requirement of this formal and conceptual device of macro and micro that I have been using a great deal. ( Rana, 2011) This is a stainless steel structure embedded with multiple photographs that differ depending on where you stand. The work addresses notions of macro and monumental cityscapes that in this instance affect one another very directly. Here, detailed images of Pakistan’s city streets and signs are contained within each of these metal windows and when given to retreating from the work, a larger more impressive image of Western skyscrapers envelops the entire work. It provides an effective reflection of the global strengths of one dynamic landscape over another developing one. The visual realisation that comes with turning to face the work again from a distance is nothing short of ‘revelatory’. Rosa Maria Falvo draws on an elemental principle when critiquing Rana’s work, namely, that ‘from a distance we see one thing, up close we understand another, and so our belief system must necessarily expand—like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model … The mirror as mirage, the twin as reflection, the micro as macro, are all aspects of Rana’s ‘accented’ anamorphosis’ (Falvo, 2010). The duality between the decorative substance of Rana’s works and the critical energy that substantiates these moral, visual conundrums appears to effectively demonstrate the jarring relationship between a situation or sensation and its constitutional parts. (For example, an image of a traditional Islamic woman dressed in a sand-coloured burqa that is made up of pixelated details of choreographed pornography. ) Thus, at its very heart Rana’s works delivers truly innovative ideas that come Rashid Rana: A return to the real
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coated in a decorative cloth. Rana’s binary interests, beauty and brutality, death and the decorative, make for a man who proves both hugely engaging and very driven. Meeting the artist a week before going to the Cornerhouse in Manchester to view his work allowed me a somewhat privileged position that heightened my experience of the exhibition. In fact, his works became even more immediate and alive just because I had previously enjoyed his descriptive narrative. Summing up our conversation, I would say that Rana’s wish is for his audience to invest a little more in his works so that they can better engage with all of the cultural and critical nuances that lie beneath the surfaces of his material. Rana and I ended our conversation by discussing intention and timing and his need to leave for another meeting and another country and of my reluctance to return to reality. For all of Rashid Rana’s progressive prowess, illustrated in the panoramic majesty of The World is Not Enough ( 2006 -2007) and the monumentality of Desperately Seeking Paradise II, I am privately drawn back to his 1992 -1993 work Untitled I, that reads like an emptied out graph upon which everything else is based. Within this tiny work of fading criss-crossed lines, lies the soul of the artist, the point from where everything else appears to have come to fruition—as if one elemental thread continued onwards from where the ‘untitled’ work left off. In essence, then, such regulated simplicity leads one back to the notion that although Rashid Rana’s works have become visually more complicated over time they continue to be defined, at their core, by simple principles and by the connecting dots that create new generations of lines.
References Falvo, R. M. (2010) ‘Rashid Rana—perpetual paradox’, Nafas Art Magazine, http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/ar ticle, accessed 19.3.2014. Spence, R. (2013), ‘Beyond the samosas’, Financial Times, 18 May, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e0ca8bc8-bbc9-11e2-82df-00144feab7de.html#axzz2wOhrDMin, accessed 19.3.2014. Rana, R. (2011), Interviewed by Rajesh Punj, October, London, Lisson Gallery.
Figure 26. Rashid Rana, Desperately Seeking Paradise II, 2010-2011. UV print on aluminium and stainless steel; 386.4×386.4×332.1cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tiroche DeLeon Collection & Ar t Vantage PCC Limited.
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Triennial City: Localising Asian Art
Contributors
Lee Weng Choy is an art critic. From 2000 to 2009, he was the Artistic Co-Director of The Substation arts centre in Singapore. He has lectured on art theory, cultural studies and policy, including at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee is the President of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics, and serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. His essays have appeared in such publications as: After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History; Broadsheet; Forum on Contemporary Art & Society; Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture; Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985; Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art; and Contemporary Art in Asia. Alnoor Mitha is Research Fellow in Asian Cultures at Manchester Metropolitan University, founding Director of Asia Triennial Manchester, an honorary Fellow at Winchester School of Art at Southampton University and a trustee for Cubitt Artists. Daksha Patel is a visual artist and researcher at Northumbria University. Her practice responds to the medical body and is concerned with digital systems that are used to scan and map the human body, and its interaction with the environment. The process of drawing is central to her practice, and the starting point for her work is often a data set or a digital scan. She is particularly interested in the visual representation of data, and explores how the artist’s drawing, in response to scientific imagery, may offer new insights into the visual representation of scientific knowledge. Daksha’s recent exhibitions include the Wellcome Trust BRAINS : THE MIND AS MATTER ( 2013) , PAINTING THE PIXEL , Gallery North ( 2014 ) , and NOISE+SIGNAL drawing performances which respond to live data from biosensors at FACT, Liverpool (2013) and Cornerhouse, Manchester ( 2013) . She has undertaken residencies at The Christie hospital, Manchester and in the neuroscience laboratories, Kings College, London. Rajesh Punj is an art critic, correspondent and curator. He studied art history and curating at Warwick University and Goldsmith’s College respectively. He has a specialist interest in Asia and the Middle East, whilst also writing extensively on European and American contemporary art, photography and design. Regularly commissioned by international publications and gallerists, including Saatchi Gallery (London ) , Flash Art International (Milan), Deutsche Bank Art Mag (Berlin), Canvas (Dubai), al art magazine (Antwerp), Art Paper ( Lebanon ) , ARC ( Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ) , Elephant ( London ) , and Asian Art Newspaper (London ) . Rajesh has written extensively on emerging markets, and has on-going research and a related volume of interviews is due for publication in late 2015, early 2016. He has also curated exhibitions in Lahore and Dhaka; and worked with Andrea Zittel ( USA ) , Anish Kapoor ( UK ) , David Goldblatt ( SA ) , and Jake and Dinos Chapman (UK ), among others.
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