Rana’s design for Sanctuary, titled Familial Unfamiliar 2, is drawn from his ongoing Transliteration series. It features a Western masterwork juxtaposed with a contemporary photo of refugees adrift on open water and facing an uncertain future. His careful rearrangement of both images disorients the viewer and creates an alluring abstraction, but closer inspection exposes the contrasts between the painting’s idealized gentry and the photograph’s reluctant migrants. “By taking European paintings and rearranging their fragments, I’m trying to see the possibilities beyond that one particular image, and free them from a specific time and place,” Rana explains. “By transliterating them, we liberate ourselves and see beyond their original contextual frameworks.”
