A Sublime Economy of Means
Solo Exhibition
Tranzitdisplay, Prague, Czech Republic (2014)

An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale

looped video projection
Duration, 3’30”

An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale is a looped video projection of an archived  photographic image in which a room full of surveyors is transformed through a series of subtle alterations. The photograph in question is titled Examining Room of the Duffing Section of the Photographic Department of the Survey of India. It was taken in 1911 in Calcutta by British photographer James Waterhouse.

We intervene in this image to conjure a constellation of stars onto a drawing board, induce tremors too gentle to disturb the richter scale, reveal a dreamed up desert, make time wind backwards, stain the afternoon with indigo, and introduce a rustle and a hesitation in the determined stillness of the surveyors hard at work mapping an empire. The work functions as a meditation on the condensation of time in the photographic image as well as a gentle  disturbance in the serious enterprise of recording and commemorating the imposition of order on a fractious landscape. The surveying department isunhinged from empire and annexed to the commonwealth of dreams.
 
This work indexes our interest in working with archival traces (which has been a longstanding pre-occupation), entering them to create layers within our experience of time, memory, and duration. However, in a departure from earlier works which reference archival materials (The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet and The Capital of Accumulation), An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale enters the archive not for investigative and analytical but for poetic purposes, leaving behind a trace leavened by whimsy.

Iterations shown at: Shown at: Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) | The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2012) | National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014)

Strikes at Time is a lucid dream. It takes readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night to take back the night.

In that no man’s land annexed by the awakening mind from the fatigue of the labouring day, the work weaves together a disquisition on time along with a discreet annotation on the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Nights of Labour’, together with renditions of the found text of a worker’s diary by the CyberMohalla Ensemble, a group of unorthodox proletarian urbanists that Raqs has been in dialogue with over a decade.

The shadowy presence of a Yaksha and Yakshi – guardians of wealth in Indic mythologies – stands watching over the work, marking time with questions.

Iterations shown at: Shown at: Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011) | National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) |The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Manchester (2017)

In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne. These vast iconic forms were dismantled and shipped to a new life at the Bharati shipyard on the West coast of India.

Raqs treats found footage of the last voyage of the ship-building cranes down the Tyne river (shot by an engineer and amateur shipyard enthusiast) to create a world of passages, transitions and departures. The ghostly forms within the images allude to floating worlds, to the enchantment of industrial machinery and the life of ships.They remain indefinite and suggestive of place, evoking an archive built by acts of lay remembering. The video enthusiast’s footage of a piece of local history is transformed in this work into vignettes from a fantastical voyage. The work is both about drifting away and coming ashore. The ‘knots’ of the title can refer both to nautical speed as well as to the complex ties that bind people to histories. Ties hold things together and speed frays them apart. The knots that bind are the knots that fray. 

Iterations shown at: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) | Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Noida, U.P (2012)

Proverbs is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships. Money, Power, Time, Emotion, Regret, Laughter, Memory are the first set of key concepts. These are the scaffolding on which a set of concrete thoughts is built, which, like proverbs, can act as the currency of conversation.

Each proverb is a frieze made out of text incised on to a horizontal plane. The proverbs are activated by fluctuations of an electrical signal that illuminate different configurations of the words in the text. Each configuration yields a terse new sense, sometimes contrarian, sometimes tangential, always precise. Light dances across the words, the proverbs change, meaning multiplies.

Iterations shown at: Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) | ‘Lado A Lado (India – Side by Side)’, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2012)