Meanwhile Elsewhere | 2014
Words, Clock-face Design on Vinyl
Raqs Media Collective
Berlin | Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh
What begins with our eyes, travels to the brain, courses to our heart, and then returns to our eyes. Reading a feeling or a moment is something that happens between different aspects of consciousness. Reading off the walls and billboards of cities, we become the words we think we feel, and yet, even as we look up or out to search for them, they always catch us unawares. We find ourselves, besides ourselves, meanwhile, elsewhere.
Meanwhile Elsewhere is an array of billboards and posters scattered across the urban landscape of Dhaka. Each billboard shows a clock-face that features words or phrases that relate to each other, possibly in counter-point. Taken together, the billboards produce a set of permutations and combinations of states of mind and being through an invocation of the actions of the hour and minute hands in a clock.
Tracing the path of these word-pairs through the city of Dhaka was like following a found poem on the streets. The completion of the thought set out in any one poster or billboard will require one to read its scattered shadows on other posters, other places. The lexical patterns produced by this process register a deeply felt, subjective experience of time and duration.
Meanwhile Elsewhere (Fear and Understanding) grows out of Raqs Media Collective’s continued pre-occupation with time and with the metaphorical possibilities of horology.
Phrases used:
Luminous | Will
Hint | Taken
Chrysanthemum | What Else
Thresh | Hold
Limestone | Passion
Wrong | Chair
Try | Me
Forage | Poison
Where Else | Disappear
Levitate | Simply
Fervid | Metric
Tight | Rope
Free | Fall
Horror | Concerto
Quantum | Apart
Blood | Noise
Light | Here
Humid | Reason
Potent | Debt
Bless | You
Why Else | Damage
Take | Melt
Now | Why
Electric | Orgasm
Market | Forces
Meanwhile | Elsewhere
Then | Why Not
How Come | Now
Luminous will | 2015
Exhibition at SMFA, Boston
Does history repeat itself, or simply rehearse its moves in anticipation? Can we read chronicles in terms of deferrals and déjà-vu rather than in terms of climaxes and closures?
“Luminous Will” refers to an eponymous work where the hands of the clock index words become phrases. The question of what is or can be a ‘Luminous Will’—an illuminated, iridescent desire for life itself—is central to the constellation of works that constitute the exhibition.
