The Time is Never Ripe
Solo Exhibition
Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, Leh, 2026
The Time is Never Ripe unfolds across two floors of the seventeenth-century building, the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO) in Leh, bringing our practice into conversation with the changing conditions of life in Ladakh. The exhibition moves through the poetic registers of fear and fatigue, awe and ecstasy, considering what happens to the body when the forces around it become difficult to anticipate or withstand.
The upper floor attends to moments when external conditions press upon the body and alter its sense of the present, calling for adaptation and endurance. On the lower floor, the exhibition turns towards what remains after such encounters; the experience of being with others, the refusal to let hardship embitter the future, and the impulse to remember and preserve what is disappearing.
This seventeenth-century building becomes a part of the viewing, here, the work enters Ladakh as a place of lived experience and changing circumstances. The exhibition considers the pressures brought by human activity and the possibility of disharmony, while also looking towards the forces of the cosmos and their long association with power, desire, and violence.
Ladakh stands at a moment of profound change. Glaciers become rivers, pastures become roads, and villages become checkpoints. The Time is Never Ripe stays with this unsettled present, while being in dialogue with attention, the reservoirs of memory, and the imagination of freedom looks like. It asks what we carry forward when the conditions of life are changing around us, and what might still be recovered from what we are in danger of forgetting.
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Works
Chimera Chorus, 2025
Embroidered figure on organza
43 × 63 inches
Chimera Chorus is a striking mixed-media artwork that combines embroidery, velvet, and organza to create an intricate, dream-like figure on fabric. The piece blends hybrid icons, mythological beings, and figures from both the deep past and the deep future. It serves as a poetic meditation on forgotten histories, hidden realities, and shifting dimensions
Itinararies X., 2025
Wallpaper
36 x 58.5 inches
The print serves as condensed enigmas, visual annotations of the questions that surfaced during the making of the film ‘Cavalcade.’ This work is shaped by prompts exchanged among the artists and responses elicited from AI agents, becoming an inquiry into how we gather, perform, and belong in a shared universe.
Chromachron, Ladakh, 2026
Paint, Pantone colors of the year 2003, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025
19 x 47 inches
Through the years of Ladakh’s administrative changes, deaths, ecological crisis, protests, gatherings, and mobilities, each year gets a colour variation. And a room becomes a witness to the test of time,with unexpected arrivals and departures, transforming the colour densities of different epochs into a musical score.
Prostheses for the History of Insurgent Crowds, 2017
Print & Installation with Wax ex-votos
36 x 36 inch
The alters of progress and speed are often impeded by accidents. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, and other bits of life (found ex-votos from a Mumbai church) become unpredictable crowds at the behest of an accelerated time. Pixelated human forms stand behind these limbs, asking who breaks whom, what is broken and what is allowed to be healed?
Parade, 2021
Gold and Silver screen print on velvet
310 x 147.5 cm
One thing after another. Everything in and out of step. The Parade sidesteps the question of where it is headed.
Wayfarers Series, 2025
Glitter drawings on Hahnemuhle Bright White Paper
4 prints
12 x 18 inch each
A congregation of illogical figurations embodying asynchronous forms of time-leakage stand outside histories and chronologies. Thinking through Ladakh’s landscapes, the prints emanate from dreams, myths, and speculations, posing the question of what it might mean to extend human
solidarity into the realm of the unknown.
An Infra-vocabulary for Capital, 2023
Vinyl on wall
Dimensions variable
Translations by,
Urdu: Jigmet Norbu (Khayal Ladakhi)
Bodhi: Tashi Morup
This inscribed selection from a list of a thousand words (reminiscent of Bhishma’s death-bed incantation of the thousand names of Vishnu) may be thought of as a ‘dying declaration’, or as a eulogy. The work involves us all as witnesses to this terminal state chanted by a dying man to the power that felled him.
A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia, 2011
Print
12 x 60 inch
A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia brings us face to face with how we encounter violence. An image that lingers with the question of how we deal with it and how we need not.
One Meter of Truth (Knowledge), 2015
Print
12 x 60 inch
A stack of books, bereft of their titles, invoke an imagined library for thoughts that need articulation. This knowledge, emanating from thoughts and untried ideas are in line, finding its fuel in silence before they discover their grounding in words.
Comic Contempt, 2021
Seven découpe text on leather, etching on acrylic
16 x 26.5 inch each
A comic’s contempt threatens the consensus, refracting the will of our time, illuminating its realities in front of us. Bail conditions set narrow perimeters, and life is forced into constraints. Laughter whispers the truth but remains in a dangerous terrain.
Seven Billion and One, 2015
Variations of the infinity sign in gold pigment, on pages of newspapers coated with black ink (English, Hindi, Urdu)
105 x 52 inch
The seven billion people of the planet are animated today as they have never been before. Taking 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 the seizing and transformation of time.
Blood Moon, 2025
Video projection
Duration, 6′ 35″
Blood Moon is an invitation to stay with a passage of time in the way we imagine and inhabit it. It draws the viewer into an unfolding encounter felt through the body and the moon, a force that stirs the skin, unsettles the heart, and reshapes the tempo of lived experience. Time is measured here by the pulses of intensity: a shimmer, a blaze, a bloom.
Ferment (Sear), 2026
Shamiana, embroidery
15 x 15 ft
A comet-like streak sears space with its burning trail, as if it were setting the sky on fire. This emblazon on the familiar star pattern of a suspended fabric continues the turn towards the canopy-form as a device under which gatherings ferment under fertile signs.
Communard Biscuits, 2017
3D Printing, Silicone mould, flour, water, salt
3 of 500 biscuits
Made in collaboration with the People’s History Museum, Kathryn Downey, University of Manchester and the Modern Caterer.
A hard tack biscuit from the Paris Commune of 1871 was 3D scanned, 3D printed, a mould made and facsimile biscuits baked. Here, history is a facsimile, waiting for a bite, to swallow the doings of time.
The Assurance Clock : An Antidote for Alarmists, 2018
Functional Metal Timepiece, Text
15 x 13 x 5 cm
The Assurance Clock, a bespoke table-timepiece, is an object of an instance of assurance, the opposite of alarm. It is an embodiment of an antidote to the epidemic of alarm, caution and false-alarms that characterises our time. Offering two kinds of fluid time, ’Yesternow’ and ‘Presentomorrow’ it weaves them into our calendars and schedules inhibiting us from embracing a more fulsome encounter with time.
Dew Lover, Drosophil(i)a, 2022
a Hand-blown glass fly
18 x 16 x 10 cm
Drosophila, an irksome animal which likes to linger on excrement and carcasses and is suspected of spreading disease. Found in ostensibly innocuous still lifes, here, it is identified as a symbol of transience, an interloper in a carefully choreographed expansion, carrying in its wake a paranoia of contamination. This glass fly hovers with compound eyes that notices everything and nothing, and floats itself into the
entropy of time.
Waiting, 2013
Laser cut on coloured acrylic
1.25 x 2 x 6 inch each
With Waiting, the sense of being bracketed between the states of ‘not yet’ and ‘has been’ is translated into a word-sculpture.
Twisted Waters, 2024
1 of 18 hand-twisted Borosil glass knots
18 x 6 x 5 cm
A knot is indicative of how closely something is bound, tied up, with itself, or with something else. As a marine measure of speed, it is also suggestive of how quickly, how speedily, something moves away. Sometimes we are the knot, and other times we come undone; reading the cosmos and attending to care.
Pamphilos, 2019
Terracotta
11 x 11 x 7 cm
Terracotta facsimiles made after the form of the Pamphilos cup found in the 2000-year-old Antikythera shipwreck. The cup of universal friendship finds a life, not as a relic, but as an object both of utility and metaphorical work, as the “friend of all.”
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Screening Programme
Deep Breath, 2019
Single screen, Video
Duration, 50 minutes
Somewhere in the depths where the Saronic Gulf meets the Aegean Sea, a fragment of an aphorism is marked that has to do with forgetting. A phrase that is inscribed on to the sea floor and then filmed with the help of three divers, sign-posts an interval between the resting place of two shipwrecks; one ancient, another not. Together they might have transported a cargo of all the old and new things that defy memory, had they kept sailing.
This submarine aide-memoire is as much about what it means to remember to breathe as it is about the forgetting of the fabric of life. It makes for the first of our. underwater art work and leaves a submarine epiphany in its wake.
(email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)
The Blood of Stars, 2017
Single screen, Video
Duration, 13 minutes
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.
A starlight is captured in a dying reindeer’s eye, eavesdrop on the logic of extraction inside an iron mine and explore the tunnels of an abandoned subterranean military facility inside the arctic circle that was left unused after being kept warm in preparation for a nuclear winter.
A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission, 2018
Single screen, Video
Duration, 18 minutes 4 seconds
The Little and Great Rann of Kutch stretch salt on the surface of the earth as far as the eye can see. They are earth that becomes sea, and sea that becomes earth, and land that turns to salt as it dries. Once the Rann of Kutch was a forest, with dinosaurs that are now fossils under the salt. Then, as the Arabian Sea made its claims on the shore, it became something like a marine drag queen, masquerading for half the year as land.
A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission turns to the Rann of Kutch, where salt stretches between sea and land, dazzling the horizon. The film is a reflection on cycles of erosion and renewal, where earth remembers its transformations.
Provisions for Everybody, 2018
Single screen, Video, Furniture
Duration, 50 minutes
Provisions for Everybody inscribes an eccentric itinerary on and off the trail of George Orwell that accompanies a reading of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. Traveling between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar (Burma) and Catalonia, Raqs pause at Wigan Pier (in England) where Orwell queried the future, at Motihari (in Bihar, India) where he was born in the shadow of an opium godown, on the road from Mandalay where he began to understand the operations of force, in the neighborhoods of Newcastle and Durham where he investigated coal mining and miners, and in the streets of Barcelona, where he dodged bullets. En-route, a thinking is formulated on how time gets its names from materials, how we burn and become fuel, and about what can be learnt from pigs, donkeys and a taxidermied elephant. They burrow under the earth, find a memorial to the Buddha’s celebration of doubt next to sugarcane fields, survey an open cast coal mine, consider planetary motion, observe the ghosts of opium and indigo, study line dancing, and find everything ablaze from neolithic times till the present.
(email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)