Cavalcade

Solo Exhibition
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, The University of Chicago, USA (2025)

“This is the cavalcade, Mahakaal, great time, great dissolution,
fisherman and doorman, bouncer and dancer, hauls the net in.
This could be the end, or the beginning, of the world.”

Centered on a forty‑minute film and accompanied by a suite of prints, Cavalcade zooms in on a gathering where humans and non-humans jostle for space, becoming a procession, a parade, a revue, a dream converging in fluid motion.

A congregation of illogical figurations embodying asynchronous forms of time-leakage stand outside histories and chronologies. This Cavalcade emanates from dreams, myths, and speculations, posing the question of what it might mean to extend human solidarity to forms of animal, mythic, and machinic sentience, to venture with them into the realm of the unknown.

Shot among the rocky outcrops of Gondwanaland and along coastlines worldwide, the film unfolds as a dreamlike procession. Planets drift, primeval lava flows surge, and intelligence oscillates between art and artifice. Mycelial threads trace new pathways, rivers split into unexpected tributaries, species evolve, and mythic and historical narratives entwine. Drawing from footage of an annual religious festival in the city of Deoghar, Jharkhand, Cavalcade follows a vibrant procession that celebrates the nuptials of the Indic deities Shiva and Parvati. In Raqs’ framing, this moment transforms into a scene where a cosmopolitan gathering expands beyond species, borders, and time.

Alongside the film, three print works serve as condensed enigmas, visual annotations of the questions that surfaced during the making of Cavalcade. These works are shaped by prompts exchanged among the artists and responses elicited from AI agents. They admit to the intrusion of an unexpected instantiation into the cosmos of the exhibition.

Raqs’ interaction with AI, generated figures of thought and action, dancing into forms both thinkable and yet to be imagined. Cavalcade becomes a cosmotechnical carnival—an inquiry into how we gather, perform, and belong in a shared universe. This work is a reckoning with the present moment and with every moment yet to come, testing the waters of time through a richly layered celebration of procession, mutation, and collective imagination.

Cavalcade

Film
Duration, 40′

Itineraries X

Wallpaper
72×48 inch, 60x 50 inch, 52×40 inch