On Oct. 18, 2007, Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan after eight years in exile, flying into Karachi, where she was greeted by a massive homecoming celebration. "We were so delighted she was back," recalls one of Pakistan's best-known contemporary artists, Rashid Rana, who was in Lahore at the time. "One felt sure good times were ahead." A few hours into the procession, two bombs exploded among the crowd. Bhutto escaped unharmed, but 143 other people were killed. Rana was among the millions who watched the event on television, images of the gnarled metal and flesh thereafter fixed in his mind.
Two months later Bhutto's assassins succeeded, but it was the events of Oct. 18 that prompted Rana to make Red Carpet, a glossy rendition of a traditional Pakistani carpet pieced together using thousands of tiny photographs of torn and dismembered animal flesh. These were taken by Rana, coincidentally, earlier that same day when he went on a research trip to a slaughterhouse, not yet sure how he would use the images. At the time he was struck by how quickly he became desensitized to the corpses and blood. Later that night the photos, all too easily conflated with the human carnage on TV, shocked him anew, and eventually came to represent in his work the brutal violence bubbling just under the surface of refined society. But Rana's decision to use animal flesh as a stand-in for human also reflects the kind of political subtext increasingly common to the work of a new generation of internationally savvy Pakistani artists, a sampling of which are in Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art From Pakistan, the first major exhibition of contemporary Pakistani art in the United States (and currently on display at the Asia Society in New York).
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