In Laughter of Tears draws us into a field of affect that pulses between joy and grief, celebration and dissent. The exhibition brings attention to moments of transmission, those flickers of connection that occur when people laugh, weep, or encounter wonder together. These are states that move before, beyond, and between language that is untranslatable, yet deeply contagious. A shared intensity shimmers through a patchwork of memory, sensation, and fleeting revelation.

Within this luminous field, Raqs gestures to a world where tears may no longer be only human, where sorrow and radiance coexist in a charged suspension. The glow that surrounds such states shelters gestures of defiance as much as it shadows the fragility of a life under watch, caught between coercion and resistance.

Symbols and stories populate the exhibition’s terrain: an owl and a donkey emerge, as if arriving and departing at once. The figure of Tyll of Braunschweig plays tricks with mirrors and perception, while Nasreddin of Aksehir calmly faces the future while riding backward. Glimpses of histories—unfinished, unruly—surface at the edges of attention. And in images that murmur and shift, humour appears, like another creature in a strange bestiary, offering yet one more way to feel and know the world.

The present unfolds in a shared, continuous stream. In this work, twenty-two hand-tufted carpets register that unfolding like quiet thresholds through which fleeting insights appear. They reflect how collective life is shaped, unraveled, and rewoven every day. Together, they form a textured surface that feels, as much as it thinks, the coarse weave of being human.

Unexpected arrivals (of a virus in one year) and departures (of a species in another) transform the colour of time. Each year gets a colour signature: a chromachron. And a room gets filled with the colors of the years through which its walls stand, waiting. It becomes a roomful of time, in neutral shades, or in camouflage. 

Iteration shown at: Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021)

A conversation in images, missives to selves and world, mood swings in lockdown and a share in the planet’s lucid dreams during a global pandemic. Gleaned from a month’s worth of the habit, within Raqs, of a regular chatter, the daily back and forth of things seen, heard, read and sensed between three people across decades. From the dawn of new feelings to the obstinate sediment of images that don’t let themselves be unseen. Disappearing ephemera, history in the making, the scene that unfolds in the corner of the eye – everything, and nothing. Real, imagined, and everywhere in between. Notes of pictures that whisper, speak in tongues, and sometimes leap, from hibernation to upheaval. 

Iterations shown at: ‘The Pandemic Circle’, Stamps Gallery, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, Expo Chicago – online (2020) | ‘CC: World’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt- online, Berlin (2020)

Ringing

Looped video

Reindeer

Looped video

A ringing interrupts everything. A reindeer appears, searching perhaps for its herd, or for a direction. The herd looks for a path. The path looks ahead, into a world yet to come. Both videos unfold as quiet alerts, circling states of loss, instinct, and the long reach of collective memory.

Power arrives in many guises, some adorned in velvet, others cloaked in shadow. In The Sovereign and its Company, forms of authority multiply and mutate. Deputised by history and haunted by their own image, these figures collapse and reconstitute, constantly reshaping themselves to meet the next moment. It asks, how long can the spectacle hold?

Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, cry out aloud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.

Iteration shown at: Frith Street Gallery, London (2024)

As time refracts, its shatter illuminates differing strands. Each panel places fragments of text and image into tension, suggesting how humour can undermine authority, even when spoken in a whisper. The work reflects on how dissent can pass through laughter, especially in times when speech is restricted and lives are circumscribed. Here, the comic’s contempt is not loud, it’s strategic, unsettling power through irony, timing, and an untraceable smile.

Iteration shown at: ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014)

The Blood of Stars invites us to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it reads meteorites for clues about the stains at the edge of every sharp blade that cuts into flesh, and registers resonances that ricochet between mining, militarism and the mutations that mark a remote landscape.

Iteration shown at: ‘Extracts from a Future History’, Lulea  (2017)

Bestiary

Paper, digital drawings, photographic colour print, gold embossing
40 prints of 33 x 46 cm each

Bestiary is a New Jataka Tale.

A Sumatran Rhinoceros, a Splendid Poison Frog, a Golden Bamboo Lemur, each endangered, each speaking in turn, in an imagined fable that echoes the tone of a Jataka tale. Together, they argue, grieve, and speculate about memory, extinction, and the arrogance of human exceptionalism. “Which form of life will persist”, they ask, “outlasting all others?” “How many will persist as ghosts in the textbooks of zoology?” 

In Bestiary, Raqs assembles a quiet chorus of animal voices, asking: what will remain when memory fades? This is a tale of what it means to be remembered by others, or not at all.

“Nothing persists, friends, if it is not remembered. Dear biped, we are still in your remembered bestiary, and in your library. So we live, after a fashion, in your memory. But once you are done with us, what will be left for you to live with, and live on? And once you depart, who will remember you? The cockroaches, they do not like archives!” 

Indian Porter Corps open theatre at Kut at the Imperial War Museum Archives depicts three dancing figures shrouded in white, dancing for a group of men seated around them in an open field. A Sergeant or officer stands with a cane, in the upper right hand corner of the frame. The performers, and the majority of the men, are porters – members of the Indian Labour Corps, who form an important part of the narrative. In Three Shadows (of care, rage, and indifference), these dancing figures in white have been isolated and animated to render them into ghostly spinning spectres.

This is in keeping with the fragments found in letters from the battlefields by Indian soldiers and non-combatants referring to spectres and a sound recording of an Indian prisoner of war in a camp in Germany speaking about ghosts emanating from the battlefields.

Iterations shown at: FirstSite, Colchester, United Kingdom (2018) | Frith Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019)

Every wilful misstep, every greedy grab, is an intimate intimidation to our own longer future. How do we stay together, in care of each other, when the fold of our collectivity is augured under the mark of contamination

Intimate intimidation is a warning drawn in salt, a symbol of danger arranged like a ritual. It marks a contaminated zone, not from fallout alone, but from the accumulations of violence, neglect, and greed. This is a meditation on proximity and peril, on how we harm what we are closest to, and what it takes to hold space for each other when the very ground beneath us signals hazard.

An owl and a donkey interpolate themselves, indicating the simultaneity of leaving and returning. Tyll of Braunschweig teaches us the trick of being on both sides of a mirror at once, and Nasreddin of Akşehir shows us how to face the future riding backwards on a gentle, fearless donkey. 

Time to pause. Time to ask, Do harmonious friends cause dissonance? There is perhaps a new Jataka tale here to be read into the future. Let us wait for it.

Figures from fables and farce: an owl, a donkey, Tyll from Braunschweig, and Nasreddin from Akşehir share the frame in quiet provocation. They traverse timelines and traditions, appearing just as ready to leave as to return. Their gestures hint at trickery, mischief, and wisdom turned inside out. The work becomes a stage for contradictions and asks Do harmonious friends cause dissonance? There is perhaps a new Jataka tale here to be read into the future. Let us wait for it.