Unveiling the Veil

Pakistani artist Rashid Rana uses pornographic images of women to create the burkha in his critique of cultural stereotypes of women.

It is not appreciating the art of Rashid Rana, arguably the most vibrant of South Asian artists on the world scene today. His art lies in what you see and what you miss. The whole is something, the parts that make it whole different altogether. It is in the symphony of the two that his work comes together.

Look at the Veil series, for instance, currently on exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. On the face of it, it is what is says, a veil, a burkha. Look closer, it is a mass of pixillated squares, pornographic images all. Is the veil a cover to these images? Are the images the reality that the veil masks? Or is the veil the reality that hides these images?

The Lahore-born Rana, like his works, does not come up with ready answers. Instead, he forces the viewer to locate the twin dimensions. In the case of Veil, as you locate the myriad squares and the images hit you, you are startled. It is then that you begin to make connections between the two.

Rana clarifies to Open: “This work is not about women’s rights per se; I am not a crusader towards any specific cause. I try to make work that broadens perceptions rather than compartmentalise them further into divisions created through pigeonholes.”

The Saatchi Gallery’s note on the Veil series states: ‘Rashid Rana critiques culturally constructed, negative stereotypes of women through his work, whether in relation to the sexual objectification of women through the pornography industry or in relation to how the burkha is worn and perceived as a political symbol in a post 9-11 era.’

Rana, though, does not want to label his work. “No, this series of work is more about the notion of representation via creating such stereotypes; it deals with broader issues. It takes a one-dimensional image, and through the micro images, creates more than one dimension within the representation of that image of veiled women. The work certainly does not hold any conscious reference to the status of women in South Asia. I wanted to break away from the generalisations that these stereotypical images are creating.”

The introduction to the series says: ‘In Veil I, Veil II & III, Rana depicts an anonymous figure dressed in a burkha. Upon further inspection, the work is actually a fragmented collage made up of thousands of small, unfocused pornographic stills of women. By using both these representations of gender in a rigid manner, Rana is effectively destroying them both, forcing the viewer to look beyond them and critique the so-called machinery of truth from which they are born.’

This is Rana’s idea behind Veil: “These particular works are part of a series which deals with the perception of reality and duality within our perceptions of certain stereotypes. The word veil literally means to cover or mask, and the word veil in relation to paradox plays an interested role as well.”

The ‘two-dimensionality’ of life has motivated Rana throughout his career, ever since he graduated in Fine Arts from Lahore in Pakistan. The paradox that everything in life, whether an idea or an image, encompasses its opposite within itself consumed him as he took his masters in Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, US, and studied fashion design in Paris.

Though trained as a painter, Rana soon ventured into other media like video, photography, installations and digital art. The duality of things and beings has been the sustaining theme of his works since the early 1990s.

Though he moved away from the traditional art techniques he learnt in college, Rana never actually forgot them. The miniature art form, which drew patronage in undivided India for centuries, continues to live in Rana’s works, although in the modern digital format, where he uses microscopic photographs to make up a collage.  

One of his rich mosaics is in his Red Carpet series. The second in the series sold for $170,500 at a Christies’ auction in 2009. The lot note by Christies’ said: ‘Comprising thousands of tiny images, ‘pixels’, depicting the slaughter of goats as prescribed by halal law, Red Carpet-2 is paradoxically an object of gruesome beauty rooted to centuries’ tradition by imitating the pixillated architecture of an actual carpet. As the viewer moves closer to the highly polished surface, the geometric pattern breaks down into its constituent parts.’

Says Rana of his works: “There is no one meaning I wish to convey to the viewer. I quite enjoy the fact that the work is deceptively abstract, which speaks about duality within this image (which is a recurrent quality in my work, be it these recent micro-macro image-based works or my grid-based paintings from the early 1990s.)”

The micro-macro abstraction earlier featured in Rana’s series titled the Ommatidia —in the units that formed an insect’s eye, which individually provided picture elements for the brain to compose an image from. Indian actors Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan featured in the series. Rana drew together hundreds of smaller, crudely-cut portraits of young Pakistani men—workers, attendants, shopkeepers—who appear haphazardly photographed by the artist, in order to compose a kaleidoscopic portrait of each of these actors. The minute faces look in adulation at their idols. Rana suggests that these cinematic heroes are the invention of the viewing public, who invest their own imaginations and desires in the hyper-reality that make up the lives of these superstars.

The artist, who had his first international solo at the Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi in 2004, admits the current show may just drive him to explore yet another unexplored art form. “I am idea driven, and my work does speak to me as it comes along. In the case of a current show on at the Musee Guimet, I have seen my own work in a different light and have sieved out interesting aspects that I can take my practice forward with. All in all, for me, what next is to dig deeper into the core of my practice.” He wants to keep the idea, if any, under wraps for now. “I would let it be a surprise.”

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