Mohatta Palace Museum is hosting its 18th exhibition titled “Labyrinth of Reflections: The Art of Rashid Rana 1992 –2012” from the February 17th. The event will be formally opened to the public by Chief Election Commissioner of Pakistan Justice (r) Fakhruddin Ebrahim on Sunday.
This much awaited exhibition of contemporary art was the first retrospective survey of Rashid Rana’s artistic career in Pakistan.
Rashid Rana was an artist of new millennium, a new age artist in every sense, who had used the influence of media in his paintings, photography and video installations to produce innovative and evocative imagery. His work had been displayed in a number of museums globally and this was the first time that an exhibition of this magnitude, displaying his work, was being held in Pakistan.
The formal and conceptual complexity of his work was unparalleled in the region, as he had been able to reach a larger audience by employing imagery that surrounded us in daily life and were relatable to the common man.
Rashid photographic mosaics, with pixel like images, had been known to capture disparate extremes and dichotomies that existed all around us. The multifaceted nature of his work addressed concerns from a socio-political and cultural to an aesthetic nature. Pixelation emerged as a metaphor through the relationship between the larger image and its micro constituents, leads to reflections over, surface and depth, and the tensions between simulated representations of a
whole and its real parts.
Curated by Hameed Haroon, Nasreen Askari and Naazish Ataullah, this exhibition was expected to be a seminal event in the evolution of contemporary art in Pakistan.
