Raqs spent time with the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, and this involved a rhythm of daily exposure to the forms, faces, and other traces of life and animation in the plethora of human, animal and angelic figures in the artworks (paintings, tapestries, textiles, fabrics, sculptures, objects, illustrated books and manuscripts) of the museum’s remarkable collection. For Raqs, these forms seemed to speak in a secret language that Raqs thought they heard in whispers and fragments. 

Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms – an assemblage of metallic forms attached etched to twelve clear, coloured acrylic plinths, emerged as a gesture of reciprocity . The work harnesses the archetypal gestures, glances, motifs and forms that Raqs found within the collection. Faces look askance, hands make secret signs, pennants flutter, cheerful rabbits mounted each other multiply in what looks like a wheel of time, and all their shadows wax and wane as eyes moved across this field of visions.