Lahore-based Rana’s work is concerned with the complex ways in which geography is necessarily associated with notions of identity, particularly in previously colonized regions. He takes a critical and non-prescriptive view of location, both physical and temporal, imagining what he calls “a negotiation between the actual and the remote” in opposition to the “false binaries” of East and West. Rana’s oeuvre encompasses painting, sculpture, video installation and experiments with photography. He is well-known on the international circuit, for his pictorial and conceptual versatility. In Present Elsewhere, Rana will discuss the way his multi-disciplinary art practice overlaps and converges with his roles as an educator and curator (of the inaugural Lahore Biennale 2017). To quote the productive Rana, they are all “exercises in creating”.
Rashid Rana is an artist and the artistic director of the 2017 Lahore Biennale. He is the founding faculty member and current Dean of the School of Visual Arts and Design at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Rana has exhibited at various public and private institutions, including Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi; Singapore Art Museum; Hong Kong Art Center; Cornerhouse, Manchester; Musée Guimet, Paris; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Lower Belvedere, Vienna; the Asia Society, New York; National Fine Arts Museum, Taichung; House of World Cultures, Berlin; and Fukuoka Museum of Art. In 2017, Rana will hold his first mid-career retrospective in India at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.