Challe Jina

Naeem Rana's psychedelic digital prints layer imagery from the urban landscape of Lahore, Rana's birthplace, with Western iconography and traditional Urdu script to create multi-dimensional montages of post colonial Pakistan. Born into a traditional family of calligraphers, Rana was trained in the art by his father, as had been the custom for centuries. His adept skill at calligraphy surfaces frequently in his work and Urdu characters are often splashed colorfully over the silhouettes of Bond girls, Coke bottles and world leaders. Taking floral patterns from traditional Kashi work and 15th century indigenous illuminated manuscripts, Rana repeats them in saturated colors, giving the effect of dazzling, if slightly gaudy, wall paper. Overall, Rana melds cultural attributes in an attempt to embody the fusion, or overlap, of cultures inherent in colonization, recreating the pastiche that epitomized the background of his childhood in Lahore.

In Challe Jina, meaning "of the size of a ring," Rana poaches lines from a Punjabi song in which the poet compares the smallness of the ring to the size of his beloved's waist.