Calm Down, Madam (or, A Brief History of Capital)
Shown at: ‘ Extra Time’, Chronus Centre, Shanghai (2013)

Assemblage with found and solicited photographs, mirrored metal and rope

The pavilions and spaces of the Shanghai Expo 2010 become chapters in Raqs’ eccentric account of a Brief History of Capital offered as a conceptual prophylactic to a nervous dowager worried about her fiscal health. By collating formal and morphic resonances between found photographic traces of the Expo while it was an active site and commissioned images (from Liu Xingzhe, a photojournalist from Shanghai) of its subsequent dereliction, as well as by subsequently annotating these two sets of images with a group of ready-made materials, Raqs construct a homeopathic algebra of forms that embraces the crests and troughs of Capital’s representation of itself as a global system.

The Expo site, its vistas and architectural embellishments become a mise-enscène for the staging of a kind of stretched out snapshot of Capital’s allure and repulsion. By observing the transformation and wear and tear of a space where Capital represents itself, Raqs construct a metaphor for its uneven career in an uncertain world. They are not confident that this will assuage the dowager’s anxieties. But there is no harm in trying to calm her down.