Big Powers, Small People: Revisiting Rashid Rana’s Ommatidia Series

In an ARTIndia review of Pakistani artist Rashid Rana’s exhibition at Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi in 2004, art historian Kavita Singh highlights the subversive power of Rana’s digital collages:

“Most of Rana’s images… worked on this principle of crucial disjuncture between the image and its constituents. The disjuncture took on many shades of meaning. Sometimes, it was between dream and reality, sometimes, between convention and fact, and sometimes, between propaganda and truth. Sometimes, the difference in scale became political, embodying big powers and small people.”

It is this political disjuncture that is particularly apparent when one considers Rana’s Ommatidia series, made the same year. Named after the bio-structural units that constitute the compound eyes of arthropods; the series consists of large-scale digital portraits of popular Hindi film superstars Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Hrithik Roshan.

From a distance, the portraits have the slightly grainy appearance of pixelated photographs. As one zooms in, the “pixels” are revealed to be photographs of thousands of ordinary young men from the streets of Lahore in Pakistan. Much like clusters of ommatidia, these photographs are fragments of a larger whole, one that is made visible only through such an assemblage. In moving closer and further away from the works, one is compelled to shift one’s gaze accordingly: focusing at one moment on the image of the actor before suddenly breaking up one’s view to take in a collective of faces. Such a back and forth allows us to contemplate the complex associations between stillness and movement, the image and the gaze, the whole and its constituents. It is this difference in scale that allows us, as Singh avers, to reflect on and engage with the possible political meanings offered by these works.

Rana’s constructs represent a cultural phenomenon that is uniquely South Asian: the cult nature of stardom in Bombay cinema—popularly known as Bollywood—and its monumental manifestations in urban society. Film stars, particularly male heroes, are more than idolised figures in South Asia. Their stardom is linked intrinsically to their fans—a public whose aspirations and desires are embodied by their heroes. By piecing together portraits of three of Bollywood’s most renowned film stars with images of ordinary and unknown men, Rana seems to highlight this tenuous and complex relationship. Just as multiple parts make a whole, the star is composed by and for the people. What is brought to the fore, then, is the fragility of the celebrity figure, strategically situated within the context of Pakistan’s cultural relationship with India. Big powers do not exist without the small people. As we start noticing the individual photographs that populate the larger image, we can no longer distinguish the original from its fragments. This deconstruction complicates our preconceived ideas of stardom and identity, making Ommatidia a subversive and incisive portrait of film culture in South Asia. 

All images courtesy Rashid Rana.

_{“Big Powers, Small People” is an excerpted phrase from Kavita Singh’s essay “Between the Part and the Whole,” published in ARTIndia magazine’s Art in Pakistan, Vol IX, Issue IV in 2004.}