Digital photomontages that address a litany of realities

Born in Pakistan, Rashid Rana now spends his time in Toronto, Lahore and has even become a known name in India. He deviated from his peers and their traditional painting techniques by deploying digital media and photography. With his conceptually driven art practice and a peculiar pixellated attention to formal concerns, he has emerged as an iconic artist on the global stage.

His culturally provocative Veil series or even the more popular Bollywood portraits employ such vast source material to convey the conflicting influences in contemporary culture. The artist is particularly known for his digital photomontages that address a litany of social, political cultural, and economic realities through ironic juxtapositions. His mosaic-like usage of minute pointillist photos pixellated images, which identify and explore these tensions between the whole and its parts, are a hallmark of his practice.

The artist’s deft digital prints weave thousands of tiny portraits and other intriguing images, conglomerating them as pixels within a single unified image, vacillating between the micro and the macro. He manipulates or miniaturized photos from advertisements into digitized re-creations to result in a visual synthesis show his fascination with the history of a ubiqutious photographic ‘moment’. He has stated:

“In this age of uncertainty we’ve probably lost the privilege of having one world view. Now every image, idea and truth encompasses its opposite within itself. Thus we live in a state of duality. This intriguing internal conflict gets translated into my work, on a formal level, as well as having historical, political and geographical connotations.”

Art lovers in France are getting to discover Rashid Rana’s remarkable talent with some of his most exciting works on display at Musée Guimet, a leading museum in Paris. The exhibition appears hand-in-hand with another show, ‘Pakistan: Where Civilizations Meet’. The two shows provide the perfect opportunity to experience ancient heritage alongside contemporary creations of a contemporary artist.