From a distance, Rashid Rana’s works present a cohesive image. Up close, they dissolve into a mosaic of often contrasting visuals, revealing the tensions between surface and depth, appearance and truth. In ‘Fractured Moment’, his solo exhibition at Frieze Rooms, London, presented by Chemould Prescot Road, Rana explores the instability of time and memory.

A true post-modernist at heart, he dismantles linearity and fixed perspectives. Renowned for his innovative use of hybrid media, Rana invites viewers into a world where moments are suspended — neither whole nor broken, but constantly shifting, mirroring the fractured realities of our globalised, image-saturated lives.

The show’s title encapsulates conceptual throughlines that animate Rana’s oeuvre — rupture, repetition and reconfiguration. By utilising the syntax of pixels and the tactile memory of images, Rana constructs a dialogue that is both personal and planetary.

Beneath the Black Square, which reframes Kazimir Malevich’s iconic Black Square — a symbol of transcendence, emptiness and pure abstraction — serves as a vessel for the censored reality of now. Rather than representing a metaphysical void, the square metamorphoses into a fractured archive: CCTV stills of Gaza’s night sky, pixellated and subdued, are punctuated by the sudden, loud yet silent flares of airstrikes. It captures not merely fiery light but the moment when violence disrupts the ordinary, as the sky isn’t sleeping anymore but bleeding.

Rashid Rana’s latest body of work serves as a meditation on war, memory and surveillance, captured through his singular artistic style

What may appear as an uneventful night reveals its true magnitude only under the brutal clarity of genocide. This is the power of Rana’s piece. It channels what the philosopher Immanuel Kant described as “the feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy” to comprehend something vast, either formless or immeasurably immense. This is not aesthetic minimalism but rather emotional maximalism that has been contained.

Beneath the Black Square is further deciphered into a triptych, Fractured Moment. This is positioned across three constricted walls within a tightly enclosed gallery space, overwhelming the viewer with a vast, haunting expanse. Comprising a continuous sequence of CCTV statics from Gaza’s night sky, the image appears still, monolithic and even serene from a distance.

However, upon stepping closer, the silence shatters. Minute bursts of light — seen as airstrikes — disrupt the darkness. The black stretch of sky, though seemingly frozen, is in a constant state of shifting and reconfiguration, as time becomes texture.

While creating this piece, Rana could not have foreseen that, just weeks later, his own country’s atmosphere would echo with the same authoritarian and violent scenes and sounds. On the nights of May 6-7, 2025, India conducted military strikes across its border, actions that Pakistan claimed targeted civilians, thus resulting in a Pakistani retaliation. The distant trauma of Gaza suddenly mirrored itself in Rana’s homeland, proving once more that war is never elsewhere.

For Rana, there are no victors in war — neither the aggressor, the victim, nor the witness. Each moment of conflict, whether captured by surveillance or memory, leaves permanent fractures. Fractured Moment is an abstraction as indictment, where stillness holds violence and silence holds screams. It is a confrontation with what we see, what we choose not to see and how close that “elsewhere” truly is.

Rashid Rana’s Amazon: The Centre Cannot Hold is a three-part reflection on how capitalism shapes the spaces we live in — its overwhelming structures, its contradictions and the strange, fractured sense of time it creates. Conceptualised as Amazon fulfilment centres and large-scale warehouses — somewhat akin to central libraries — these vast interiors echo order and magnitude.

Built from photographs of the everyday, utilitarian objects in Lahore and old books found in Sunday bazaars, they fuse the local with the global in quietly subversive ways. The familiar becomes peculiar as the local is integrated into a global grid and vice versa. An onlooker might not only see sites of consumption here but also military depots and marching bands, regimented and orchestrated.

In this new body of work, Rana creates space for mourning, remembering and noticing. His abstraction is not a retreat from the world but a deeper plunge into its complexity. His practice resides at the edge of contradiction: beauty and brutality, order and chaos, global and local or “glocal”, as he asserts at times.

A pixel, a moment — with a burst of light. A fracture that shatters the whole. We no longer overlook; we begin to witness.

‘Fractured Moment’ was on display at Frieze Rooms
in London from May 23-June 8, 2025

The writer is an art critic, curator and an associate professor (currently on sabbatical) at the Department of Visual Communication Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.
He spends his time in-between Birmingham and Lahore.
He can be reached at aarish.sardar@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 15th, 2025