An Interview

The Collective Eye interviews Raqs Media Collective and delves deep into their early days, influences, and experiences

The Laughter of Tears

The Laughter of Tears Solo ExhibitionKunstverein Braunschweig, Germany  When we are in the sonic range of the flightpaths of a flock of birds returning to a roosting site, we become intimate with their together-ness. When people are awestruck by wonder, or tickled into laughter, or moved to tears, they momentarily transmit to each other before, […]

When Proust Catches the Glare

As the earth turns to spin slightly faster than before in 2021, and as the heavens break ranks, involuntary memories return to the beckoning of the lime-tar-fish-jasmine-gasoline-brine smell of a new time. This smell of a new time needs new words – and an old hand – to write it all down. 

Freeing the Weight of the Habitual

This essay examines how established practices and ingrained habits can both confine and shape creative and curatorial processes. It poses the question, “What is the mechanism — and how do we seek it — of ‘freeing’ the weights of habitual narrative entrapments?” prompting questions related to the forms and premises of the “system ofgovernance” that […]

Thickets

“Being anywhere inside a thicket means having to deal with a tango between tenses, between the consequences of what yesterday has done, and what tomorrow will bring, and what the present proposes, all at the same time.” Moving between the sit-ins at Shaheen Bagh, the farmers’ protests, and pandemic lockdowns, Raqs invokes the thicket as […]

The Event-Shaped Hole and the Photographic Image

“The image making and processing capacity happen continuously, just as respiration, or digestion does, The new image machines breathe, digest, dream and excrete pictures. they don’t just ‘take’ them.” This essay introduces Raqs’ concept of the “event-shaped hole,” suggesting that photographs can act as pieces of evidence, even when the events themselves are absent from […]

Still More World

Still More World Solo ExhibitionMathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) Still More World confronts the thresholds of sustainability and to consider what futures we might illuminate—or extinguish—in our quest to shape the world. It is a delicate interplay between the material and immaterial, reminding us that every illuminated skyline carries within it echoes […]

On How Not to Accelerate in Reverse Gear

“Every museum is a time machine with multiple pedals for acceleration, all movingonly in reverse gear. Even a museum that addresses the contemporary immediatelytransforms the present into a packaged relic, and then you exit through the gift shop,again. This means that the museum of the future is somewhat of an oxymoron. Atime machine that moves […]

The double act of Flower time

“This paradox of memory is a negotiation between having to remember, the obligation tomourn, the uncertainty of moments and conditions of its activation, the inability to recall, andthe slow grinding requirement to forget and move on.“ This essay reflects on the complex relationship between memory, war, and public art. Drawing upon historical events and personal […]