Rashid Rana

Gallery Chemould, Mumbai

Musée Guimet, Paris, Rashid Rana - Perpétuel Paradoxe, 15 July - 15 November 2010

Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal / Chemould Prescott Road, 2010, pp. 187-189 illus.

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Considered to be one of the most prominent Pakistani artists working today, Rashid Rana’s practice reflects upon the increasing impact of globalization while concurrently exploring local traditions in South Asia. His works range from themes of religion and faith to urbanization and popular culture.

This work was produced in 2007, and employs his technique of creating photo mosaics with the images used to create these montages often in steep contrast with what they collectively portray. At first glance, Red Carpet appears to be an exact description of its title, a deep crimson Persian rug, but upon closer inspection one realizes that the photos, incorporated as a grid, are details of images taken in abattoirs. His works are deliberately flattened, so that they are removed from reality and invite closer inspection. When one contemplates the juxtaposition of a luxurious, impeccable and expensive rug with the violent and bloody images that create it, a deeper understanding of the artist’s practice is established. Rana is challenging the viewers’ conceptions and establishing new meanings for the items he exposes.

 ‘The opposition between beauty and death integral to Rana’s Red Carpet series has been explored by generations of artists, and sometimes overturned. The Symbolists, at their most decadent, replaced truth with death in [John] Keats’ paradigm, asserting that beauty was death, and death, beauty. In our own time, we have grown familiar with that dazzling marker of our last end, Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, produced in the same year as the first Red Carpet. Rana’s take on the theme accords with his practice of first engaging viewers with iconic, picturesque or monumental images and then revealing these easily recognised and digested views to be constituted of mundane, gruesome or explicitly sexual details. He sets up contrasts that sometimes appear simplistic, but possess an undercurrent of signification, one usually related to the conditions and confusions of the subcontinent, that destabilises categories which seem mutually exclusive.

 The photomosaic and the carpet share the property of elaborateness, though one is crafted with the help of high-end software and the other through a painstaking technique barely changed for millennia. Our curiosity about the manner of the print’s manufacture leads us to consider the same for the carpet it depicts. This brings to mind the fact that carpet weavers and butchers aren’t that far apart: they ply traditional trades and mostly struggle to make ends meet. Such interplay between the big picture, its components, and the nature of their creation, breaks down an initially perceived stark opposition into a complex pattern of relationships.’ (Girish Shahane, Conversations: Rashid Rana, 2010, accessed from http://shahanegirish.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/rashid-rana-2010.html on 20th January 2013). The Red Carpet series is visually as poetic as Keats' ode to beauty, truth, life and death.