A knot is indicative of how closely something is bound, tied up, with itself, or with something else. As a marine measure of speed, it is also suggestive of how quickly, how speedily, something moves away. Knots link worlds of passages, transitions and departures. Knots that bind, knots that fray. Tears follow knots.

We are the knot, and sometimes, we come undone. And then, it’s back to living again, to know how to thread the rope, to tie the knot, to read the wind, and to attend to care and the cosmos.

Each of the glass knots rests on individual small carpets, all of whom are woven with patterns of Indian rivers. Together, each relay, is placed on a transparent Perspex shelf. Placed at different heights, the shelves present like points on a wave.

Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, cry out aloud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.

Iteration at: ‘The Laughter of Tears’, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021)

Borderlands is a series of seven laser engravings on black sandpaper. Rendered black on black, the hard-to-decipher drawings riff off medieval depictions of animals where the intended creature and its depiction only nominally match. A leopard with a human-like face, a snake that resembles a dragon, an owl with a moustache interact with diagrammatic time cones. All of these are merely approximations of their intention (whether creature or time), and each allows us to both fix a possibility as well as to expand a horizon.

Created 12 years after their video work The Untold Intimacy of Digits (U.I.D) (2011), which animated a nineteenth century Bengali peasant’s handprint found in a London archive into a spectral count towards infinity, Unruly Iris of Dissent magnifies a restless human iris, focussing on the U.I.D (Unique Identification Database) that lies at the heart of India’s ‘Aadhar’ citizen identification system which aims to turn every person resident in India into a number. The video, playing again with the acronym U.I.D in its title, Unruly Iris of Dissent (U.I.D 2), looks eye-to-eye with power that wants to look a little too closely at human bodies. A set of four prints on metallic paper Delta (2023–24) play with imagery from these two pieces. Delta connects the eye of U.I.D 2 to the eye that weeps in Tears (are not only from weeping).

Iteration at: Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2023)

Twisted Time is places two distorted miniature glass bicycle wheels mounted on a mirrored plinth, rotating slowly. Twisted from what might have been a collision, both wheels turn into möbius forms in their reflections. A möbius strip is a continuous form with no beginning or end; the loops of the twisted rotating wheels in turn echo the movement of the nearby record player, and the looping of the video works.

Some of the works in the exhibition emerge from Raqs’s commission for the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House. The film that was made for The Cosmic House, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (2023), is a poetic reflection on perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time, past and present, interrogating varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries.