Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat
Shown at: 48 SHEET Billboard Project, Brimingham (2012); ‘Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014); ‘Twilight Language’, The Whitworth, Manchester (2017); ‘Everything Else is Ordinary’, K21, Museuem of 21st Century Art, Düsseldorf (2018)

Animated Horological Video, Words
Duration, 4’31”

Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat is an animation presenting a clock-face with changing word couplings –  instead of numbers – in order to reference the passing of hours. The words are an array of adjectives and nouns that qualify each other, flying across the face of the clock, arranging and rearranging themselves, producing constant permutations and combinations of states of mind and being through the actions of the hour and minute hands that join two words at different points of time.

The lexical patterns produced by this process register a deeply felt, subjective experience of time and duration. This work grows out of Raqs’ sustained preoccupation with time and with the metaphorical possibilities of horology. It annotates their earlier experiment with clocks, feelings and words – Escapement.