October 23, 2004

What you see is not what you get when Rashid Rana is the artist concerned. Viewing his work at the VM Gallery was a kaleidoscopic experience in which the young artist audaciously steered visitors into a reassessment of their views, norms and icons. He has today’s urban culture squaring up to studio art and a heady dialogue emerges, says

Aten-foot long, six-foot high artwork, A Day in the Life of a Landscape, appeared as a familiar oil painting on canvas placed in a gold frame. It was familiar because it was appropriated from a painting by Khalid Iqbal, but the ‘brush strokes’ were a composite of minute photo prints, some 10,000 in all, many repeated images, in a technical process of digital printmaking. It is an amazing adventure in which sky, water and landscape features are reproduced in gradient hues. Close up, and one discovers hundreds more landscapes in tiny tiles: images taken from the busiest areas of Lahore. Much of Rana’s work is closely linked to his experience of growing up in that city.

“I’m very much a Lahori. I was born in the city and spent most of my life here. When I was an art student I remember Khalid Iqbal going about five kilometres out of Lahore and finding a spot which he painted to look like a rural scene and his back, was always turned to Lahore. So I created this scene from digital images of the city.

“When I began to take photographs I realized that if I worked on the project myself it would take another two years to complete. The pace of things is changing these days, you have to execute your ideas pretty soon, so I got a team of people together and asked them to take certain kinds of pictures for me with a digital camera. My students used to go out on motorbikes and I told them the kind of pictures I wanted and from which areas of Lahore. Then I would edit the pictures and delete any I didn’t intend to use. In two hours, I would get two hundred photographs. Landscape in general may look lifeless, but I believe the metropolis is a living body and I wanted to do a piece about that along with documenting contradictions.”

Rashid Rana has shown his work in America, Europe India and other parts of Asia. In 2003, he won the International Artist of the Year Award from SAVAK, South Asian Visual Arts Collective, Toronto, and at the 9th Cairo Biennale, Egypt, was awarded the Hathor prize for his contribution. An associate professor at the School of Visual Arts, Beacon House National University, Lahore, he began his art training at the National College of Arts, Lahore taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts in ‘92. He went on to Boston, USA, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in ‘94. In ‘96, he took admission at La Chambre Syndicate de la Couture, Paris where he studied fashion design.

“In the early ‘90s, while I was in Boston, I was working closely with Zahoorul Akhlaq and for quite some time I was into geometric abstraction, horizontal and vertical lines, trying to find depth within the two dimensionality, using only grey colour or graphite itself. I realized I had to move on and my current work is how my painting evolved.

“For the last few years my work has been very ideas-driven so I take the concerns in mind and find a medium that can best express them; it depends on how the ideas evolve and what kind of execution they require. According to that I’ll choose my medium and if I have to acquire new skills, I will do that. If I need paint I’ll use it. I think in the future I will be combining oils with printed images, I love the stress and the process.”

Rana pointed out the first in the series of digital prints, a portrait of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, exhibited in 2002 at a show tiled ‘About Miniatures’. Again, the diffused image seen from a distance was recognizable as the emperor; examined up close, it was a variegated tapestry of images taken from hoardings and billboards seen on the streets of Lahore.

“To talk about something new is to talk about this present time and the tools of the time. I wanted to create something that looked like a miniature painting from a distance, and when you got up close it had a more immediate experience. In this visual culture we see billboards more than anything else so I reduced them to miniatures.

“I stated working with a team about four years ago. We work in what I call ‘my factory’, a workshop with all my tools and computers. I take assistance from programmers, graphics people and a photographer and I have about 20 machines so all the money I earn goes into my work. People think if it’s computer based it’s easy, you just press a button and it’s done but it’s not like that at all. Every medium, every skill has its own delicate details, only certain things done simultaneously can create the mosaic.”

Another favourite component of Rashid Rana’s work are stills from Indian cinema. He admits to being an ardent film fan and believes films really affect our lives. He rattled off a list of great movie titles and spoke of various aspects of film-making. “Cinema is not a reflection of our lives,” he says, “we are a reflection of the cinema.” And he quotes a line from a film: ‘Tradition is an illusion of permanence’.

Three poster-type portraits of Bollywood mega-stars smiled down from the walls; incredibly handsome. The young miniaturist, Sumaira Tazeen joined me and gleefully noticed that all the icons were composed of pictures of very ordinary looking young men. The men of Lahore and the film stars looked our way and we gazed back. Here the artist had explored the way the heroes look at the camera and the way the audience looks at the screen. He combined them so they all view the audience, and it’s about the way young men project themselves, or wish to be heroes.

Thousands of mini-images were also taken from Bollywood stills to create two large panels positioned in a corner of the gallery. ‘All Eyes Skyward during the Annual Parade’ depicted a section of a crowd of people, men women and children, looking upwards and evidently watching a fly past during a military parade. One can almost walk into this piece and it takes a while to recognize the epic as a mirror image: there is such movement in the composition and diversity of patterns.

Incredibly woven together from 24,000 tiny tiles are the ‘Stars’ of screen of yesterday and today, acting out their various memorable roles assimilating the dreams and fantasies of the viewers. Here one senses a link that joins the people of two neighbouring countries conveying its own message.

According to Rashid Rana, posters of foreign landscapes are sold on the streets of Lahore, thus inspiring an artwork, ‘The Picture is not at Rest’, that was awarded the Hathor Award at the Cairo Biennale 2003. Taking a pastoral landscape of hills and pretty houses that resembled Switzerland, Rana superimposed the digital modified mirror image with combat soldiers appearing to run across the surface from right to left, and creating blocks of blurred windows in the red tiled houses. Deeper in the hilly landscapes, tiny military outposts are discernible.

“When I started working on this piece I realized I could express other things too, the contradictions within society, or in me and comment on the representation in the media and how reality is presented. Even a mirror image looks alike but is totally opposite. On a formal level I have been playing with different works which have a recurring theme or mirror images in different ways so that it becomes like a game or simply engaging for the viewer.”

Continuing to explore the mirror image, Rana puts Arnold Schwartzenegger, armed to the teeth, in a battleground fused with disturbing images of the war in Afghanistan. Another image has the artist taking a duel role, gun to gun with himself in a film of his own making. In a different mood, he is the star of a poster which, simulating early animated cartoon, has him in different stages of dressing, and a variety of outfits in an attempt to break a stereotype concept of how artists dress.

Images of the Emperor Jehangir’s tomb, and the interior of the Wazir Khan Mosque, Lahore, materialize from the nitty-gritty of Lahore, myriad images magically assembled to bring history alive. “I am living in this time and I have an understanding of my own traditions that will somehow reflect in the work,” he says with a conviction.