Dis-Location: Rashid Rana

In this age of uncertainty we have lost the privilege to have only one worldview: the absence of truth or realisation of its impossibility is invoked through the works of Rashid Rana. Now every image, idea and truth (may it be ancient or media generated) encompasses its opposite within itself. Thus we live in a state of duality. This perpetual paradox is the main concern for Rashid Rana. In some of his works this duality is represented in the form of a mirror image. Hence the two sides of Offshore Accounts, I Do Not Always Feel Immortal* and Meeting Point* suggest the situation/possibility of encountering the “Other”, presumably a crucial consideration of our times.

In Rana’s work, the “Other” is no more than the reflection of one’s own views, assumptions and beliefs. If at one moment, the duplicity or multiplicity of views (in a literal sense, tiny pictures made into one large image), resembles our lives which revolve around contradictions of all sorts, at the same time it converts the three dimensionality of the world into the flatness of pictorial space.

In this respect the art of Rashid Rana is formal and conceptual, even though it is difficult to distinguish the two – like a perfect mirror image.

-QUDDUS MIRZA, 2007