Rashid Rana

Rashid Rana (solo exhibition), Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, February 2007

Diasec mounted digital C print in two panels joined vertically at the center of the image. The colors of the catalogue detail are close to the original. Good overall condition.
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Rashid Rana is a master of culling sources, ideas, and images: so it is perfectly apt that in the present work the title references a recent blockbuster Hollywood movie. In The World Is Not Enough, the artist explores the edges of content and representation. Traditionally photography allows the artist to represent 3-dimensional space on a flat surface and provide the viewer with a vantage point. Rashid Rana on the other hand, creates an impossible image. The artist employs carefully selected angles to photograph the subject, and techniques for combining multiple images to create a near 2-dimensional space independent of its inherent 3-dimensionality. What we get is a seemingly infinite mass of trash, which from a distance bears an uncanny resemblance to the large canvasses of nonrepresentational art from the postwar era. However, at close viewing distance, the apparently 2-dimensional texture resumes its 3-dimensionality.

Concurrently we get a sense of the scale and singularity of man's ambition not through great feats of industry or the miracle of science, but through the one of the residual by-products of our age. This, in itself, is significant since Rana presents his work with a slickness that actually gives way to a deliberative maneuver of representing the derivate in new guises. Here, as elsewhere in the artist's work, the juxtaposition of beauty and the macabre forces the viewer into an acknowledgement of the politics of the piece. The works first draws-in and then engulfs the vewer with its scope and scale.