Rashid Rana’s fan following is immense. To many young artists, he is a friend, philosopher and guide, whom they see as their inspiration. Response to my last column bears testimony to this fact. Several queries reached me following the publication of the first part of the piece on him, disputing my description of him as someone “driven by destiny”. According to the assertion, by saying that I am denying him the human agency that enables anyone to make their own decisions and traverse the path of their own choice. Going by that logic, projecting him as somebody guided and propelled by destiny does not do justice to the rough and tumble Rana went through in his life.

Rana is a maverick. Such individuals create their own destiny. But that observation calls for a qualification. I don’t deny that he treaded a path of his own choosing but before he had acquired prominence as a visual artist, destiny acted as his rudder, as is evident from the perspective in which he was born and bred. Rana hailed from a relatively humble background as his father was a police constable who reached his age of superannuation as a head constable. When he was of school going age, Rana was sent to a government school which had bare minimum facilities. Subsequently, he won a place at Lahore’s Central Model School after going through a competitive admission process. After matriculation he got enrolled at the FC College Lahore aiming to become an engineer – an aim that he never accomplished. Having a penchant for mathematics, he wanted to acquire expertise in architecture. He tried his luck at the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, but he was goaded towards Fine Arts instead, primarily because those on the interview panel detected in him a spark that they deemed crucial for painting. So he landed in fine arts and excelled at it. In the meantime, Rana also tried to join the army at the behest of his father but did not get selected. Destiny intervened and pushed him in the direction that would eventually lead him towards becoming one of the leading artists of the country. Rana is a self-made person, but he does not seem to have the entitlement and the self-righteousness that self-made people usually do. Also, there is no trace of bitterness in his disposition.

As has already been mentioned in the first part of this write-up, Zahoor ul Akhlaq was Rana’s first source of inspiration. Raphael is another artist he admires. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition and visual achievement of the neo-Platonic ideal of human grandeur. That is the fundamental reason for his admiration for Raphael – most famous for his paintings including Madonna in the Meadow (1505/06), School of Athens (c. 1508–11), Sistine Madonna (1512/13), The Transfiguration (1516–20), and Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–15).

It is important to mention that parallel to his iconic art practice, Rana has coined the term EART which needs elaboration. EART denotes moments wherein self-expression transcends the arts. It is about creative impulse applied to the ways of thinking and acting in real life. An exhibition at the Dantzic Building in central Manchester in July 2021 explored how EART could be applied to a variety of everyday situations. It features new ideas with utopian aspirations that can still be realised in the form of planet-wide businesses, hence suggesting a change from within the system; MINUS Glocal, a concept store selling essential grocery items suggests the possibility of world without paid advertising; 1001 Minds Glocal, a concept for a new social media app devised by Rana that provides structure for the democratisation of expression through social media. Exit Glocal is about a housing development that presents a new way of living that celebrates de-compartmentalisation of various components of urban life as its primary focus. Out of these three concepts, the MINUS Glocal grocery shop was physically realised in Manchester on 10 Hanover Street. The ‘subversively’ unbranded designs highlighted the powerful role that branding plays in consumer choices. Through the shop Rana aimed to eliminate this power and save on publicity-associated costs, transferring his benefit eventually to the consumer. All said and done, be it social media or real estate development, or a chain of grocery stores, the ideas, if realised globally, can turn “capitalism inside out and consumerism upside down.”

Rana translated his idea into reality by transforming architecture. He created the exterior of the Pakistan pavilion at the Dubai Expo, making the whole nation proud. “Pakistan pavilion is being regarded by many including CNN as one of the top attractions at the expo.”

Let’s turn to the theoretical aspect of Rashid Rana’s art practice. He says, “My initial interest in the duality of space (Untitled Series/Grid painting, from early 1990s) later on expounded into a wider interest in duality, paradoxes, contradictions, polarities and parallel realities (works from 2002-2009), [which was] a way of dealing with the burden of representing reality.” He believes that “these dualities are very effective as a tool for lessening the drama of presumed absolutes and negating them because they often draw attention to their own absurdity and hence the use of doubles, mirrors etc.” However, in 2004, he thought that every image, idea, and truth (ancient or modern) encompasses its opposite within itself. Thus, “we can say we live in a state of duality”. This internal conflict translates into his work at a formal level – as well as having geographical, historical, and political connotations.

Now he reckons that the binaries of East and West are often overplayed, the binary of ‘actual’ and ‘remote’ are more plausible. The actual is close at hand – something one can experience directly with the body as the site of knowing. The ‘remote’ is knowledge amassed indirectly, from diverse sources scattered across time and space. The result is a meditation on location, both in a physical as well as temporal sense.

Rana has participated in more than 80 exhibitions. He is the first living artist to have had a “survey solo exhibition” at the prestigious Musee’ Guimet Paris. In 2015, his work was included in a landmark exhibition titled The Treasure of the World from the British Museum, held at the National Museum of Singapore. Along with Rana’s work, the exhibition had 239 objects from the entire human history. In 2013, an exhibition of his work took place at Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi, which was the largest exhibition in Pakistan ever to be held by a single artist. His works are in various public and private collections including the British Museum London, Metropolitan Museum New York, and Fukuoka Museum, Japan. Rashid Rana received the Game Changer Asia Award by the Asia Society in 2017 and was awarded International Artist of the year by SAVAC Canada in 2003. Recently, the Pakistan government conferred a Sitara-i-Imtiaz on him. It appears too little and too late for a person of his stature.

The author is a professor of history and a writer. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk