Coronation Park (2015)
Giardini, ‘All the World’s Futures’, Venice Biennale (2015); ‘Twilight Language’, The Whitworth, University of Manchester (2017); ‘Everything Else is Ordinary’, K21, Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018)
Eight sculptures (resin), nine plinths (wood and bitumen) and nine plaques (faux black marble)
The King without a Face, 4’4” x 4’3” x 12’8”; The Viceroy’s Better Half, 3’4” x 2’5” x 7’6”; Truncated Mid-Section, 3’3” x 3’10” x 7’11”; Empty Robe, 3’7” x 3’1” x 10’; The Grip, 3’ 6’ x 2’9” x 7’11”; The Bending Man, 3’1” x 3’4” x 7’6”; Boots, 1’6” x 11” x 1’9”; Sword, 6” x 3’8”; The Empty Plinth
Coronation Park offer nine meditations on power’s deepest anxiety: the inevitability of abdication, which always shadows its claim to permanence.
These formations, presented as defaced, truncated and interrupted sculptures – are reminiscent of, or abstracted from, erstwhile Imperial statuary.
In this case, they also reference an actual site of some dereliction and neglect called Coronation Park, located at the outskirts of Delhi, where the Imperial Durban of 1911 was held to pay homage to the British Monarch and his consort when they visited the citadel of their Indian Empire. Today this site is the last refuge of abandoned and dethroned statues of monarchs and viceroys that once graced places of prominence in India’s capital.
In Coronation Park, Raqs makes nine quasi-doppelgängers of these Imperial residues stand on, beside, and in one instance, go AWOL from, their plinths.
Sometimes the sculpture offered up for consideration is just a pair of high boots that end in legs that fade away into mid air, or the hint of a fist clasping the hilt of a sword, an empty cape minus its body, or a frozen, faceless apparition. As synecdochic fragments, or parodies, of ceremonial regalia, these residues of authoritative stances and accoutrements of dematerialized power commemorate neither victory nor endurance – but stand as patient witnesses to hubris.
The plinths themselves are emblazoned with circular plaques on which are inscribed statements adapted from George Orwell’s parable about the brittleness of Imperial authority, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936). One of the plaques says : “It was at this moment, as he stood there with the weapon in his hands, that he first grasped
the hollowness, the futility.”
Coronation Park was first seen interrupting the boulevard in the Giardini in the 56th Venice Biennale (‘All The World’s Futures’) in 2015 , tricking some visitors into believing that the sculptures had always been there. That is one of the things that power tries to do – pretend – to its own eternity. Since then, wherever it goes or finds itself installed, Coronation Park remain an opportunity to reflect on this delusion.
***
The King Without a Face
Begin, provisionally, at the last square. Like a chess game in reverse. The dark pawn is
about to be crowned, and the pale king is
in check.
The Face of the sovereign gets rubbed off the coin with use. That can also be history.
Skip a turn and stand still, for now and for ever
The Viceroy’s Better Half
Sometimes, just standing is the best move.
Especially if it is a last stand.
Solitude will have at least a leg, maybe two,
to stand on Fine legs too
Truncated Mid-Section
At a certain indeterminate but proximate
stage of game. it becomes difficult to
digest the rules. The players get forgetful.
Histories infect each other like stomach bugs.
In Delhi, we call it Delhi belly.
Memory, said St Augustine, is the stomach
of mind. Then history must be the
stomach of power. What happens if
that distended belly gets an ulcer? Sometimes,
the surgeon’s knife excises the stomach to get rid of the canker.
Left with empty treasure chest, a story
gone bust, you can either draw from the bank,
or ask for a loan from another player.
Empty Robe
The other players change the game. No more
monopoly.
Now we play strip poker. Time shows its cards,
and someone has to pay.
Except that in this game, nakedness is best
seen as emptiness. It’s the opposite of the well-
known children’s story.
The tailor’s stitched so well that they took out
the tailor’s dummy and let the robes flutter all
by themselves. And then there was a gust of
strong wind.
The emperor had only his clothes. There was
nothing to the rest of him.
That was all.
The Grip
In the matter of letting go. which is the very
opposite of getting a grip, one has to obey every
relevant thermodynamic principle. In the end,
every substance, even constituted power, dis-
olves into wild energy.
Learning to be a good loser is as difficult as
learning how to win. Abdication is as tough
a games as Coronation.
Boots
Try and play the adversary’s hand Step out of
your boots and into his shoes.
Sometimes the fit is remarkable. You can play
against yourself just as easily you would for
yourself.
The highest goal of the self is usually a self-goal.
The Bending Man
Defeat comes hard-coded in the victor’s stance.
The winner bends to receive the medal.
The Empty Plinth
Back to square one. No winners, nothing to lose
Nothing but the future remains of the past. AN
empty garden, a vacant game, awaiting play.
Your turn..
Coronation Park (2015)
Giardini, ‘All the World’s Futures’, Venice Biennale (2015)
Raqs interrupted the Giardini within Coronation Park, an assemblage of plinths, sculptures and plaques that invoked the aesthetic of public garden sculptures. The sculptures are fragments of ceremonial regalia, residues of authoritative stances, and the accoutrements of dematerialized power —and they commemorate neither victory nor defeat. They offer nine meditations on hubris.
Coronation Park echoes and amplifies the accidental epiphany that Raqs experienced a long time ago about the nature of power at the eponymous derelict quasi-ceremonial space where relics of the British Raj are kept for the consideration of an absent public at the outskirts of Delhi.
Coronation Park (2017)
‘Twilight Language’, Solo Exhibition at The Whitworth, University of Manchester (2017)
(4 sculptures displayed)
Twilight Language signals a lighthouse semaphore for all that is lost and found between errant longitudes, infected histories and contagious futures. This is the time when everything changes; memorials defect, communards bake biscuits, moths mutate, divers rise, clocks speak in tongues. Animals, machines, and humans recover grounds of equality and conversation. Words turn incandescent, enigma shadows everything, twilight finds its language.
For this exhibition, 4 sculptures were displayed, namely ‘Disgfigured’; ‘Truncated’; ‘Empty Robe’; ‘Bending Man’.
Coronation Park (2018)
‘Everything Else is Ordinary’, Solo Exhibition at K21, Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018)
(4 Sculptures Displayed)
The point of departure for Everything Else is Ordinary is Raqs’ continual fascination with time, a topic that has preoccupied the members of the group intensively ever since they began working together.
For this exhibition, 4 sculptures were displayed, namely ‘Truncated Mid-Section’; ‘Empty Robe’; ‘The Viceroy’s Better Half’; ‘The Grip’.
