Vigil
Shown at: ‘ Extra Time’, Chronus Centre, Shanghai (2013)

Video diptych
Duration, 96′ 45″

In Vigil, Raqs telescope the fortunes of a football match (the 20th round of the Chinese Football Association Super League in 2012 at the Hongkou Football Stadium in Shanghai) between two rival Chinese football clubs (Shanghai Shenhua F.C. and Hangzhou Greentown F.C.) into an orchestrated meditation on time and fate. The exhilaration, the exhaustion, long periods of waiting, the despair, the loneliness, the frenzy, the fear, the hostility, the laughter, the applause, the frustration, the remorse – all is read across two static camera positions in a football game. Fixated on the two goalposts, the cameras yield footages that enable a reading of the two goalkeepers’ faces, their postures and gait – as a chronology of emotions, layered with the electric intensity of a crowd that marks every moment in the game with its vivid presence.

A football match becomes an atlas of time, with continents of fortune and misfortune, striated by alternating currents of triumph and disaster coursing through the crowd, marked by a tonality of emotions and states of being with others. All of this, and more, is found inscribed on the bodies of the two men who guard the goalposts at two ends of an unsettled score.