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Lot Essay
Rashid Rana's Veil series of works have been widely exhibited from venues such as the National Museum of Modern Art, Mumbai as part of the historic 2005 exhibition, Beyond Borders: Art of Pakistan, to its submission and recognition as a finalist for the 2006 Sovereign Art Asian Prize in Hong Kong.
This highly ironic and subversive work operates on mulitple levels addressing issues of feminism and Islam in a very unique way. "The justification for the veil traditionally has been the protection of women from the lustful gazes of men but what is controlled is the sight of women not the vision of men. The veiled woman is one of the most common tropes of art from the Islamic world...Rana's work adds a new and discordant note to this chorus. His close-ups of the heavily shrouded, dehumanized faceless faces are, amazingly composed of hard-core pornography downloaded from the internet. In the encounter, the images are both shocking and beautiful...And when one recognizes the pixels, one thinks of the unlikely juxtaposition first as opposites, and then, numbingly as the same. The thousands of naked women are as depersonalized as the woman behind the veil." (Kavita Singh, Rashid Rana; Identical Views, Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi, 2005, p.24)
This highly ironic and subversive work operates on mulitple levels addressing issues of feminism and Islam in a very unique way. "The justification for the veil traditionally has been the protection of women from the lustful gazes of men but what is controlled is the sight of women not the vision of men. The veiled woman is one of the most common tropes of art from the Islamic world...Rana's work adds a new and discordant note to this chorus. His close-ups of the heavily shrouded, dehumanized faceless faces are, amazingly composed of hard-core pornography downloaded from the internet. In the encounter, the images are both shocking and beautiful...And when one recognizes the pixels, one thinks of the unlikely juxtaposition first as opposites, and then, numbingly as the same. The thousands of naked women are as depersonalized as the woman behind the veil." (Kavita Singh, Rashid Rana; Identical Views, Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi, 2005, p.24)