Uma Rashid Solo Show in Seoul Blurs History and Fiction to Question Power
Creatrip Team
18 days ago
Artist Uma Rashid’s solo exhibition “The Age of Totalitarianism IV: Bread and Circus’s Slow-Motion Chaos” is on view at LEEahn Gallery in Changseong-dong, Seoul through Oct. 17. The Chicago-born, Los Angeles–based artist presents the fourth chapter of a 20-year series of “alternative histories,” combining painting, installation, and textile works to probe structures of power and control beneath tourism, sports, leisure, brands, and entertainment. Rashid creates fictional empires, nations, characters and events (for example her hybrid nation “Frangland”), weaving them with real history and myth. Her works mix illuminated-manuscript-like color, ukiyo-e–style flat planes, and crisp outlines; mythic figures, historical personae, brand logos and pop icons collide to blur the line between fact and fiction. Notable works include “Ishtar Gate,” an installation reinterpreting the ancient Babylonian gate and acting as an entry to her imagined world, “The Battle of Long Beach,” which stages a fictional Spanish-American conflict featuring masked Zorro, Michael Jackson and N.W.A., and “The Evian Incident,” a serene-appearing resort scene populated by skis, wolves, mammoths and spacecraft that subtly embeds signs of conflict while treating the Evian water brand as a symbol of consumer power. Rashid says she wants to make complex histories, including painful African histories, more approachable through humor and brightness while urging reflection on how leisure and consumption intertwine with violence and control.
