Red Carpet Series, 2007

Over the years, Rana has refined a software application that he uses to compose his works.

This application knows how to build a larger image by seeking out the appropriately tinted pictures from a particular library, and fitting them into place as though weaving a pattern. The perfection of his technique has allowed Rana to produce works of a scale and intricacy beyond merely human capacity.

The celebrated Red Carpet series takes the technique to the limit of baroque excess. Ten feet across and seven feet high, these prints seem to produce perfect facsimiles of beautiful Persian carpets. Closer up, they turn out to be made up of stomach-churning images from a slaughterhouse – a butcher‟s hands probing an open abdomen, a tray of flayed goats‟ heads, slit necks bleeding into a gutter, even knots of sheep patiently awaiting slaughter.

Rana is playing with notions of multiple perspectives and the idea of a fragmented narrative that contradicts the long-established art historical concept of a static moment. Rana states that “visual imagery in Europe evolved in a way that, in both concept and form, two-dimensional art depicted a frozen moment.”