Still More World
Solo Exhibition
Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019)

Still More World draws from the energy of Doha’s urban landscape of light, a defining element of this global city in motion, shaped by its networks of people and raw materials. The exhibition presents various installations—ranging from video works to textiles and sculptures—created between 2011 and 2019, displayed at Mathaf and across the city.

Literary narratives and scientific anecdotes interweave to reflect on cycles of progress and transformation, exploring the movement of people and populations while contrasting the material and immaterial. The series ‘Dohas for Doha’ (2019) plays with language, energy, and digital technologies, appearing both at Mathaf and as an intervention on Burj Doha, using lights and architecture of this iconic building to mark the conversation between Raqs and the city. The textile work ‘To People’ (2019) layers pixelated crowds, evoking the diversity of Doha’s inhabitants and the expanding networks they form. Other works investigate the connections between living organisms, the natural world, geological time, and the cosmos.

The works in this exhibition re-examine human progress and natural resources, considering historical and contemporary movements of people and the way terrains change.Continuing Raqs’ inquiry into the immeasurable, the exhibition embodies the paradox of humanity’s present condition; the promise and desire for growth coupled with the question of how much more the earth has left to give.

The video works Dohas for Doha present illuminated proverbs that play with language, light, and the transmission of knowledge. A doha is a poetic form of four-line verses, popularized by the medieval Hindi poet and mystic Kabir. By shifting sequences of words, these dohas create multiple meanings and linguistic puns, engaging in a poetic interplay between the city of Doha and Raqs. The word doha in Hindi also means ‘double,’ offering another layer of resonance.

Provisions for Everybody

Installation with 3 Videos, large drawing print, 3 dhurrie banners, drawings on vinyl, found furniture

“Coal Mine. Windmill. Sugarcane Field. Words. Pictures. Memes. It’s all about energy; everything is burning.”

“How not to write slow poisoning love letters to life?”, Raqs asks, as they collect provisions for everybody, straddle a planet rotating without permission, create an untimely calendar for the centuries from stone, coal, oil and windmills, and call up spectres of ordinariness to help forsake the comfort of readymade answers. What is on offer is a weave of thoughts found on the road; as well as images, calculations, texts, textures and textiles which accompany and aid the task of re-imagining the relation between potential and plenitude.

The video that lends its name to the installation, Provisions for Everybody, follows an itinerary on and off the trail of George Orwell. Traveling between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar, and Catalonia, Raqs finds that one place shadows another, but one time never fits all. The work follows an itinerary that traces George Orwell’s journeys through Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar, and Catalonia, mapping shadows of places across time. Raqs’ journey takes them to Orwell’s birthplace in Motihari, Bihar in Eastern India, where they consider his assertion – “to abolish class – (and caste)- distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself” in tandem with the Buddha’s celebration of doubt, which happened more than two millennia ago, in the same neighborhood. The accompanying video ‘A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission’ reflects on daily revolutions through silent, expansive horizons. Drawings of a series of ordinary objects that resonate with things noted and remarked upon in the reading of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ animate a third annotative video, titled, ‘Things to Look at and Reconsider’. Suspended dhurrie banners titled ‘Let the Future Praise Us’ recalls historical labor movements, weaving together thoughts, images, calculations, and textures that reconsider the relationship between potential and plenitude.

Iteration shown at: AV Festival, Newcastle (2018)

This architectural installation speaks to the evolution of materials and living forms across alternative time epochs. The 3D printed structure represents crystal cerussite ,while the light projections refer to the changing colorations of the peppered moth that occurred during the industrial revolution. At the beginning of the age, the black and white peppered moth experienced industrial melanism –  its pigment became black for better camouflage in an environment polluted with soot residues. This evolutionary strategy was reversed when pollution levels were reduced. These varied states of transformation speak to changing invisible threads of ecology, and compressed time.

Iteration shown at: The Whitworth, Manchester (2017) | Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020) | The work is now in the permanent collection of Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art , Doha.

In every sum figured by power, a remainder haunts the calculation. Not everything adds up. A people are never equal to a listing of their bodies. They are something more and something less than a population. Counting counter to the reasons of state, Raj Konai, a peasant from nineteenth century Bengal, the owner of the floating trace of a disembodied hand indexed in a distant archive, persists in his arithmetic. The handprint of Raj Konai was taken in 1858 under the orders of William Herschel – scientist, statistician, and at the time, a revenue official with the Bengal government. It was sent by Herschel to Francis Galton, a London eugenicist and pioneer of identification technologies. It is currently in the custody of the Francis Galton Collection of the University College of London. This is where the Raqs collective first encountered the image of Raj Konai’s hand. Fingerprinting experiments, and later technologies, all began with this handprint. India has now embarked on a nationwide Unique Identification Database (UID) and plans to have its billion soon counted and indexed.

Iterations shown at: Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2011)| Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) | Museum fur Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt (2012) | National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) | K21, Düsseldorf (2018)

A series of handwoven carpets and paper prints cascade through the gallery, depicting figures as interwoven forms—collectives, networks, and the act of ‘peopling’ a space. The work explores the meaning of the verb ‘to people’, which can suggest populating and inhabiting a space, wilfully or enforced, but can also be read as a work that is ‘for people’, referring to one person or multiple individuals.

The pixelated figures create a modular, blurred landscape of objects and human forms in transition. Together the carpets constitute one image of the nexus of people coming together in large urban cities. The pixelated silhouettes evoke movement, transition, and the densities of urban life, reflecting the diverse inhabitants of Doha and the broad networks they create.

The seven billion people of the planet are animated today as they have never been before — with possibilities, propositional forms, and with an entirely new morphology and vocabulary of solidarity. There is an infinity of infinite possibilities. This takes the form of a recognition of abundance and a sense of infinite plenitude in everyday life, in a million mutinies, that translate into occurrences, co-incidences and resistances. We are in a time of kairos, not chaos — of the seizing and transformation of time.

Iteration shown at: School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015)

Fragments from South Asian poets—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Rabindranath Tagore, and Agha Shahid Ali—appear in Urdu, Bengali, and English across lenticular prints. Faiz calls for reconciliation, Tagore writes of embracing the stranger, and Agha Shahid Ali reflects on how the experience of exile can become ’beloved‘ with time. Reading across the three panels evokes the moment of silence before turning to others to mediate meaning, much like the shift that occurs when crossing borders and partitions.

36 Planes of Emotions

Laser engraved acrylic glass, furniture, lighting (180 x 150 x 60 cm)
Graphic design: Amitabh Kumar + Satyabrata Rai

This work plays with the idea that human experience is not singular, but layered. 36 descriptive phrases describe feelings that cannot be reduced to a single word, to evoke the complexity of emotions such as joy, fear, love and sadness, as experiences that impact the state of the brain and heart differently for every individual. 

These phrases were formed with the thinking about how a person or a body inhabits a feeling that emerges in the context of different experiences and situations. Raqs describes this practice as exploring the ‘spectrum of unrecognised possibilities’. Rereading the phrases as book titles on plexiglass suggests the possibility of transparency, as complexity of emotion is revealed in a way that a single abstract noun cannot do.

Iterations shown at: Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) |  The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2012) | The Whitworth, Manchester (2017) |K21, Düsseldorf (2018)