IMRAN CHANNA

Imran Channa lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan. In recent years, he has been working in Europe and North America. The artist is interested in the interplay that exists between historical archives and how they are projected or reimagined in the present, and how this re-imagination fuels a construction of that which has passed. His technique of drawing an exact copy of a historic photo, partially erasing it, and zooming into selected erasures with a microscope, demonstrates how the image can survive repeated transformations and reincarnate into different times and locations with different purposes. These ghost-like traces of original drawings provide another kind of evidence, that of continued psychic disturbance that is produced when history — in large and small ways — is remade and in turn, molds our lives, and how this process of erasure and fabrication is ceaselessly and continuously inflected by power and ideology. The laborious process of drawing, erasure, and re-inscription, effacing the legibility of the original image resonates with the unstable process of documenting, displacing, banishing, and commemorating.  What remains are wipes, stripes, and dust.

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