A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia

A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper 305 x 61 inches Exhibited in Clark House initiated ‘Artists Against AFSPA’ at NGMA, Mumbai (2011), ‘Waiting for the Wind’, Experimenter, Kolkata (2014) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014)

Autodidact’s Transport

The Autodidact’s Transport is a transformation of the interior of a Gwangju local metro train with literal lines of conversation (originally diagrammed from Raqs’ computer conversations with each other), scripted orations that parse Erasmus’ ‘In Praise of Folly’ to think about democracy, and with short films with aphorisms that run on the advertising monitors in the trains.

Log Book Entry Before Storm

Log Book Entry Before Storm Site specific transformation In ‘Whorled Explorations’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi 2014 Log Book Entry Before Storm is a site specific installation that occupies what was once a peculiar domestic space- a single house cut in two by a concrete wall to accommodate two families. The work re-introduces circulation into this still […]

Time Interruptions (2009, 2014)

Escapement 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped Dimensions variable Escapement was first imagined in the form of Location (n) at Italy Cultural Centre, Sao Paolo; Nature Morte (2006) Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does […]

The Great Bare Mat

The Great Bare Mat Series encapsulates Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012-2013) The piece was designed as a carpet for the staging of conversations, and installed at the feet of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-fold 17th-century Japanese screen from the Gardner Museum’s collection. “The Great Bare Mat” gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, […]

Extra Time

Extra Time Chronus Centre, Shanghai (2013) Extra Time opened as the chronic Art Center’s inaugural show. The show focuses on Raqs’ investigations of time and temporality in different registers that span the spectrum of their diverse practice ranging from performance, to installation, architectural ensembles, video, and photography. By creating striking constellations of images, by using […]

Blood Of Stars: A walk in ten scenes

Site specific intervention at the Statsberget Cave Single screen, Video, 13 minutes  Extracts from a Future History | Lulea  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 […]

The House Of Everything And Nothing

Text, Illumination and Surface Modification of an Abandoned House 24 Jor Bagh, Delhi (2013) The House of Everything and Nothing is an exploration of the infinity of worlds that Raqs Media Collective inhabit. In 2013, Raqs asked a software programmer to come up with an algorithm that could help render the pattern generated data harvested […]

A Phrase, Not a Word

A Phrase, Not a Word Exhibition with videos, large-scale prints, a typographic sculpture and a sound installation Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi (2012) With “A Phrase, Not A Word”, Raqs’ diverse and eclectic practice becomes a playground for ideas and reflections on conversations and the notion of language. The exhibition gathers an arsenal of images, objects, voices, […]

Guesswork

Guesswork Frith Street Gallery, London (2012) The works featured in Guesswork invite the viewer to consider what it means to measure infinity and to seize time rather than to be captive to the passing moment. By working with pixels and proverbs, circuits and syntax, Raqs turn thoughts into images and images into questions. The works ask us […]

The Great Bare Mat and Constellation

The Great Bare Mat and Constellation Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston (2012) The “Great Bare Mat” of the title refers to a carpet made for the exhibition, a surface for the staging of conversations, displayed at the base of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-part 17th century Japanese screen from the Museum’s Collection.  The carpet’s repeated […]

Diagram for the Last International

Diagram for the Last International Video Loop Performa Festival, New York (2013); National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014) In 2011-12, while thinking about weaving disparate processes, interests and possibilities of all kinds together, Raqs invited Suraj Rai, a self-taught computer programmer, to create a snapshot of their working and thinking together. Suraj plotted the […]

Eccentric Orbits

Eccentric Orbits is a suite of four videos featuring mysterious activities in a world that weighs things differently than the one we think we know.

A Different Gravity

A Different Gravity Furniture, Words, Mirror, Illumination, Carpet, Print India Art Fair, Project 88 (2012) A Different Gravity presents a flying carpet, a timetable, a wrong chair, and a mirror stage of some sort. You can play with all of these like you would in a scrabble game, and in the mix can have flying […]

Primary Education of the Autodidact

Primary Education of the Autodidact Vinyl transfer on building windows Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2012) The Primary Education of the Autodidact, commissioned by the Audain Gallery, is out of a series of works by Raqs Media Collective that explores knowledge, power, utterance, and silence. It directly addresses the notion and problematic of the autodidact, and also […]

phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (TWO LOVE STORIES)

phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (Two Love Stories) Single channel projected digital slide show, gilded frame, 90 x 120 cm Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi (2012) A sailor, a prostitute, a city, the search for warmth, and a slice of snatched time; Shore Leave is a short story in words and images about words and the unsaid, about desire […]

The Robin Hood of Wisdom

The Robin Hood of Wisdom Printed Cards, Guerrilla Actions Copenhagen Art Festival, Denmark (2012) What does knowledge taste like? The unsalted white of an egg. It asks for the garnish of betrayal. An instruction based work for public libraries which pauses to consider the saline taste of wisdom. “We thought of the community of readership, which […]

P.T.O

Presented by Shveta Sarda This book is an appreciation of the listening, walking, reading, interviewing, collecting, questioning, mapping, recording, drawing, image-making and writing done by the hundreds of Independent Fellows associated with Sarai over the last decade. The works by the Fellows have been publicly archived through postings in the Sarai Reader-list and in the […]

How to get from here to there

How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon | Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) Seven photographic prints trace the journey of an illuminated vehicle across a liminal landscape. Neon letters, gesturing towards a terse but optimistic instruction, annotate each […]

Rewriting on the wall

In Rewriting On the Wall, hand-prints are reconfigured to produce an alphabet of gestures—each a gloss of the letters in standard American Sign Language as used by the deaf community.

More Salt In Your Tears

More Salt In Your Tears first presented as a text sculpture composed of three dimensional stainless steel letter-forms anchored on to a shallow section of seabed of the Baltic Sea near Turku, Finland.

Seen at Secunderabagh 

Seen at Secunderabagh | 2011 With Zuleikha Chaudhari Performative installation with actors, video projection, sets The starting point for Seen at Secundrabagh is a photograph taken in 1857 by the war photographer Felice Beato three months after a bloody mutiny within the British East India Company. Four men and a horse pose in front of the lens, […]

We the Fuel

We the Fuel | 2011 9 framed photographs, tape residue (210 x 180 cm) A collage made with treated film posters and dental X-rays Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011); Helsinki Photography Biennale, Finland (2014)

Reading Light

Reading Light Siege du Parti Communiste Francaise, Festival d’Automne, Paris (2011) Reading Light – the work presented by Raqs in Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic building for the French Communist Party at the Place Colonel Fabien – was a set of illuminated signs that use text, typography, light sources and electricity to conjure a renewal of human aspirations. […]

Surjection

How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon, Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) Seven photographic prints trace the journey of an illuminated vehicle across a liminal landscape. Neon letters, gesturing towards a terse but optimistic instruction, annotate each step of […]

Premonition

Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011) Sometimes, not even the insistent repetition of phenomena finds you prepared for the uncanny tug of premonition. Premonition: the anticipatory call of things forever about to happen. Even if nothing happens. Even if the emergency lights flicker away a wasting sense of urgency. The Impostor in the Waiting Room  2004/  Installation […]

Misadventures of A Phantom Limb

Vertical Video Loop | 2011  “Asamayavali/ Untimely Calendar”, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) Prevailing economic theories, no matter how rational they pretend to be, attribute a quasi-mystical power to the force that is imagined as governing the continuing fluctuations of production and exchange. Often this force is named an ‘invisible hand’. […]

The Librarian’s Lucid Dream

The Librarian’s Lucid Dream Wallpaper Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Books have lost their titles, and the titles have gone astray, create dalliances with each others’ words. The Librarian’s Lucid Dream is a wallpaper carnival of impossible books made up of the index card entries for an imaginary library.  In each instance, the uncanny, nagging sensation that says […]

The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon

The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon Black and white lambda prints, Series of 5, each 76 x 76 cm Project 88, Mumbai (2010); NGMA, Delhi (2014) The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon constructs an itinerary in the footsteps of Rosa Luxemberg’s last days in Berlin, with a detour into the yard of the former Rosa […]

The Communist Latento

The Communist Latento is an image/text series that features photographs of found minimalist hand-drawn signage on transparent surfaces (mainly arrows and direction markers) annotated by a set of terse statements by Raqs.

Time is Money

Time is Money Prints, Series of 5, each 12 x 28 cm Impossible Exchange, Frieze Fair (2010); Time Currency, Liverpool Biennial (2010) Speculating on the concept of “time”, Time is Money intertwines financial and political matters related to capitalism with ontological issues related to ephemerality and permanence. “The idea of deploying time in terms of […]

Surface Tension Studies

Surface Tension Studies Giclée prints on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 13, each 25 x 40 cm Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) Surface Tension Studies is a suite of photographs which considers making choices between unfathomable depth and a distant horizon, encountering the strong pull of submerged currents, the attractions of beaching […]

phantoroman: Skirmish

phantoroman: SKIRMISH Laser-cut acrylic over inkjet on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 8, each 40 x 60 cm  Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Skirmish is a brief, unhappy, love story with pictures and text, another of Raqs’ ongoing forays into the photo-roman form. Skirmish tells the story of an imagined estranged couple fighting a coded war of […]

Over Time

Seven frames stand in for the seven days of the week. Each frame contains an assemblage of suspended objects.

Can You Say that Again (5 Uneasy Pieces)

Can You Say that Again (5 Uneasy Pieces) Temporary public sculpture with 5 audio tracks (4:36, 4:43, 6:03, 4:59, 5:19); 5 sets of paired life-size sculptures with seating extensions, five recorded dialogues, speakers, sensors Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang, Korea (2010) Can You Say That Again? (5 Uneasy Pieces) features an intimate portable outdoor audio theater, […]

Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World

Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World Digital print on Hahnemühle FineArt pape, 89 x 41 cm Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks. Each block, repeated across the map, stands in for some superlative claim or the other on the planet and its resources. Perhaps this is a completed puzzle waiting […]

Brazen (Pittsburgh Torpedo)

Brazen (2009) was displayed at The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London and New York.
In the grounds of an abandoned steel furnace, in a city that once made the greatest amount of steel in the world, there stands an emptied out torpedo car that once transported hot molten pig iron to a steel factory across a river on rail tracks.

Escapement

Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does it mean to be living in these times, in these quickening hours, these accumulating minutes, these multiplying seconds, here, now?

On the Other Hand

The clock’s hands measure the stations of the hours, while human hands play their own game of silhouettes, closing in on the hour of fear only to then open out on the moment of ecstasy, as if protecting Time from its own devices. 

Decomposition

The installation uses found poetry and accidental discoveries in archives and takes the form of a playful gesture of appreciation of the labour of the archivist.

One Four Four Zero

One Four Four Zero Acrylic glass tubes in circular acrylic housing, 15 x 64 cm diameter Escapement, Frith Street Gallery, London (2009) One thousand four hundred and forty crystal perspex tubes, some square, some circular, some hexagonal, sit tightly packed in what looks like an transparent empty clock set on a plinth. Each handcrafted perspex […]

Love is Engineering

used transparencies of mechanical drawing encased in plexiglass sheets, the clouded light of dawn and the rudimentary text of the screenplay of an imaginary film sequence to speak of the quotidian battle between love and time, fought over the delicate terms of the silent departure of a man from his lover’s bed.

Reserve Army

Reserve Army Human-sized sand finish fibreglass sculptures, cash, and barbed wire ornaments, printed vinyl screen, 335 x 214 cm MuHKA, Antwerp (2008); The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London and New York (2008-09); Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2009) The sculptural installation The Reserve Army examines the intersection of a personal artistic practice (in this […]

Unusually Adrift from the Shoreline

Unusually Adrift From the Shoreline is a work about darkness, light, navigation and memory. Centred on a cinema lost to time, it is intended to prompt unfamiliar thoughts in the city. Thoughts and feelings about the pleasures and the hidden perils of losing oneself: in movies, at sea, and in the oceanic expanse of time.

Unfamiliar Tales

Unfamiliar Tales Lenticular photographs, Etched acrylic sheets, 2 sets of 2, each 90 x 120 cm Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2008-09) “Unfamiliar Tales” is a pair of image-text diptychs titled ‘How The Most Terrible Solitude Was Overcome’ and ‘How the Long Wait for the Thaw was Endured’. The work features lenticular reproduction of photographic […]

DisOrient

DisOrient Print on bond paper, 30 x 21 cm Part of Markus Meissen’s The Violence of Participation, 2007 Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2007); Markus Meissen, The Violence of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007) A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of […]

TIME BOOK

Time Book, Exhibition Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) Special thanks to the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, Homestead, PA. Hanging on the wall across from the entrance are four non-working factory time clocks. The hand of each clock is set to the digits: 1-9-8-6, the year a number of steel mills in the area closed. An […]

INSURANCE % INVESTMENT

Insurance%Investment illustrates the mental arithmetic of investment and insurance, two mechanisms designed to administer, anticipate and forestall risk, speculation and the possibility of failure.

Sightings & Four Figures

Sightings is a photographic experiment with decaying architecture that suggests cartographic resonances. While, Four Figures works out four ways of making sense of today’s world, mapping a frontier between precarity and possibility.

Just Passed Harmony

Just Passed Harmony Inkjet on galvanized aluminum. 18 x 182 cm Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) A long strip of galvanized steel bears the emboss of the high road, just past the town called harmony. On the way, possibly to Industry. 

With Respect to Residue

With respect to residue is a project deigned to provoke reflection about the things, states of being, and histories that end up abandoned and waste, as the detritus of the routine processes that constitute and maintain the world.

Contribution For “2006 Peace Tower”

Contribution For “2006 Peace Tower” Vinyl Panel, 2 feet x 2 feet A piece in response to the invitation from Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija to contribute to the ‘Peace Tower’ for the Whitney Biennial 2006. The 2006 Peace Tower, echoes the ‘Artists Tower for Peace and Against the War in Vietnam’ designed by […]

There Has Been A Change Of Plan 

There Has Been A Change Of Plan  2006/ Photographs on Hahnemuhle FInArt paper.  Series of 4, each 96 x 137 cm There has been a change of plan, Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi (2006)   There has been a change of plan features enigmatic images of aircraft abandoned in a dessert blossoming after a rain shower. […]

A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him

A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him Installation with rebar, furniture, closed circuit video  Sub-contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006). Bombaysers de Lille, Maison Folie Moulins, Lille (2006-07)  “A dying man sings of that which felled him” presents its viewer with a silent song of a thousand words, a bier of iron […]

3 Caveats On A Barewall | 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually

3 Caveats On A Barewall | 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually Installation of bilingual wall texts and wrist band inscriptions Sub-contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006)  “3 Caveats…” are a set of inscriptions designed to be read on a bare wall, or worn as wristbands, that ask questions about viewership, curation, exhibition and […]

 Erosion by Whispers

2005/ 2 lightboxes, galvanized wire, printed broadsheets, 66 x  76 x 13 cm | Exhibited at Ephemeral cities: A Project Space, Deptford X, London (2005) 

Lost new shoes

2005/ Installation with shoes, astroturf, and video projections | Exhibited at Citizens, Pitzhanger Manor House, London (2005); The City Gallery, Leicester (2005); Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales (2005); Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; (2005).  Lost New Shoes confronts the notion of the ‘citizen’ by looking at the absence or void where a person may be. One way of […]

The Wherehouse

The Wherehouse Installation with video, found objects, altered books, text panels, audio, spoken performance, photographs, and web page  Revolution/Restoration II, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2004); Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2004–05) The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment. It constitutes an assemblage of […]

The Imposter in the Waiting Room

The Imposter in the Waiting Room Installation with video, photography, performance, text, sound and print Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2004). National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014) The Impostor in the Waiting Room is a consideration on what happens when modernity encounters its shadow. As a group of practitioners who navigate routes in and […]

The Network of No_Des

The Network of No_Des HTML 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art (2004) “Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as ‘no-des’ gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to the old words – ‘des’, and ‘par-des’. ‘Des‘ (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; ‘pardes’ suggests exile, and an alien […]

Utopia is a hearing aid

2003/ Posters installed in situ in Venice, Italy. 90x 60 cm (Utopia Station, Venice Biennale 2003) External link: Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming? by Raqs Media Collective e-flux journal issue #56 June 2014

A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)

3-screen video & sound installation, with images, text and transcripts of a simulated chat room conversation | 2003 In this installation (which also doubles as a piece of text-based one-act electronic theatre), transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and […]

TAS (Temporary Autonomous Sarai)

Raqs Media Collective with Atelier BowWow (Tokyo)  Portable, multi-use structure made with packing crates for computers, projectors, paper, sound and people.   Exhibited at How Latitudes Become Forms, Walker Art Center Minneapolis (2003) Commissioned by the Walker Art Center and funded by the Foundation, Temporary Autonomous Sarai is an installation and interdisciplinary collaboration between RAQS Media Collective (New […]

n°28 

28.28 N / 77.15 E : 2001/02 (Co-Ordinates, Delhi) Raqs, with Pradip Saha, translate documentary video and audio log sheets, notes, excerpts from legal document, and stickers and signs to create a matrix of meaning around questions of space, access, barriers and the law in cites today. Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check […]

N- Dl Jn. (New Delhi Junction) 

Location: 28° 28′ N, 77° 15′ ETime Zone: – | – | UTC/GMT +5.30 HoursAirports: 1Inhabitants: 10,009,200 (Delhi), 16, 713,200 (Including Agglomeration) 24 x CD Players, Headphones and 24 x 5 Minute Audio Loops/MP3 | F.0037.0000 A sound work about moving into, and circulating within the city of Delhi – a magnet as well as a […]

OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification)

OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) Software | 2022 OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) was an online space for people, machines, and codes to play and work together – to share, create and transform images, sounds, videos and texts. Opus was an attempt to create a digital commons in culture, based on the principle of […]

Coordinates Of Everyday Life

Coordinates of Everyday Life
3 videos, 1 floor vinyl, 10,000 stickers for city walls
Co-ordinates 28.8N 77.15E. Installation using video screens, sound, print, and stickers
Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); CityOne conference, Sarai/CSDS Delhi (2003); The Roomade Office for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2003); Image Asia, Copenhagen (2003); Adaptations, curated by Craig Buckley, at Apex Art gallery in New York (2004); Fredrecianum, Kassel (2004); Digital Discourse, Malta (2005 – 2006).

The History & Practice of Cinematography in India

The History & Practice of Cinematography in India is a collection of transcripts of interviews with veteran and working cameramen, texts, archival photographs, production stills, bibliography, a timeline and other resources on the history of cinematographic practice in India.