RASHID RANA

• Recollection

• 2017

• C-Print + DIASEC

• Notions of Narration II

• 2013

• C print + DIASEC

• War Within II

• 2013

• C-Print + DIASEC

This artwork is called War Within II it was created by Rashid Rana in 2013. The title says a war, people fighting on the left and right side and in the centre of the work there is some people on the floor however the work is pixelated. Rana creates this pixelated affect by digitally separating the work into squares and then combining them together until it has the pixelated look giving the old painting a new look.

Rana is interested in dualities of space, time, tradition, and culture. He uses pixelation to show these dualities. Rana takes paintings, mostly historical paintings, and rearranges them into a new piece, war within II the actual image of it is Oath of the Horatii by Jacques Louis David, so Rana broke down the image into a grid and then cut those into smaller pieces to suggest a different era and place. This is because Rana has an interest between actual and remote, which are defined by him like “actual is physically witnessed and shared through proximity, while remote refers to information that is experienced and understood second-hand, usually via media.”

Rana rearranges the painting so it can resemble media images of violence, bomb blast, fires, and dismemberment, by doing this what something was once history is now raw material that has as context the present, so through this practise what is based in imagination becomes something that shows and represents the chaos of reality “Rana’s practice is an act of upstaging as he rips apart the formal harmony of historic Western painting”

This piece of work makes me feel amazed because it is kind of hard to represent what the present and its chaos with a painting that had a completely meaning behind and rearrange it so it can have a new meaning that shows the violence in the present day.