DOHA.- In Fractured Moment (2025), Rashid Rana mobilises the power of an image as a witness and architect to modern- day conflict. It encapsulates the artist’s continued inquiry into space, time, and the relationship between wholeness and fragmentation. The work engages with formalism, documentation and abstraction as repositories for contemporary storytelling. It examines the tensions between surface and depth, presence and absence, order and rupture, and the consequences of political mechanics underlying trade and hostilities. What results are considered mediations on fractures that, once captured, reveal both the seen and the unseen, as they unravel.

In the work, created as an archival inkjet print of paper and produced as a wallpaper, he serves the illusion of a frozen moment by presenting a sequence of static images drawn from CCTV footage of a night sky in Gaza. Deeply influenced by the Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square', he recomposes that idea three-dimensionally, mounting the images on an expansive and immersive scale that engulfs the viewer's field of vision. They record time precisely as it unfolds: the sombre night sky is lit up by intermittent bursts of air strikes which leave behind a stygian sea of darkness in their wake. While apparently motionless, the atmosphere is continuously reconfiguring itself as the camera captures each moment.

Overwhelmed by an asymmetric war, the inky, obsidian canopy devoid of stars bears testimony to the lost hopes and buried dreams of an already oppressed people.

Malevich painted the Black Square during a period of social upheaval in Russia in 1915. It was a polemic against the religious orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the autocratic rule of the Tsar which culminated in the Bolshevik revolution. The Russian avant-garde artist considered the Black Square as the “zero point of painting” which he proclaimed as “the embryo of all possibilities; which in its development, acquires a terrible strength”. Rana appears to harness its primordial power inversely to imagine the attempted annihilation of Gaza as a moment of hubris for the aggressor.

Fractured Moment is reminiscent of Dis-Location (2007), an earlier series of works, where he created large scale reconstructions of colonial-era buildings and neighbourhoods in Lahore using thousands of tiny images of the same location shot over a 24-hour period. Here again, Fractured Moment, Rana reframes the viewer’s perception of space and time, in the context of a live war, accessible to all through the internet.

Using subversion and duality, which have been vital to his practice, he questions how western mainstream news media has distorted the context for the conflict and sensationalised the outcomes. By freezing that moment in his work, he urges us to pause, look beyond the spectacle, and contemplate the brutalities hidden underneath this seemingly aestheticized montage.

Profoundly, the work reminds us that for societies pushed to the brink of obliteration, every moment can be a lifetime.