Forthcoming Titles
Shown at: Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi (2012)

Books, jacket cover designs, frames
set of 10

Three unwritten books, each marking a whimsical relationship to specific influential texts (by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Illyich Lenin and Antonio Gramsci) in the canon of Marxism, find their place amongst a set of echoing titles in a carefully laid out miniature library. Their authors have uncannily resonant names. This could be the beginning of an un-reading list, or a clearing in a small thicket of anagrams. 

Forthcoming Titles’ Borgesian faux-seriousness is reminiscent of a library’s ‘new arrivals’ or ‘coming soon’ corner, in this case stacked with books filled with what Raqs call ‘the unwritten word’. What titles would one browse if one came across its stacks, folded into the course of a tiring day like a mirage in a desert? Can books be desired into existence by reciting the spells that are waiting to be read off the surfaces of their wished-for spines? Raqs ask whether the truant reader can ever repay his/her debts (with interest), to an education purloined from thin air, by wishing for mirror books and shadow authors?