An Interview

The Collective Eye interviews Raqs Media Collective and delves deep into their early days, influences, and experiences. They discuss a wide range of works from ‘Coronation Park’ in 2015 to the public commission, ‘All, Human’ in 2023.

The Laughter of Tears

The Laughter of Tears | 2021 Kunstverein 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 […]

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. 

salt

Text and image essay by Raqs, published in The Drama Review, Volume 65 Issue 4, 2021

Thickets

Text by Raqs, published in “Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice”, 2021

Sharing our Sources

Text by Raqs (and extracts from essays), in the first publication accompanying “Afterglow”, Yokohama Triennale 2020, curated by Raqs Media Collective

Still more World

Dohas for Doha Five Videos, LED screens, variable dimensions Still More World, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art | Doha (2019) Dohas woven by Kabir, Rahim sees them in the Stars Raqs finds them everywhere, in Doha and in Mars This doha talks in shadow speech Where words fail Raqs, let commas reach When nothing […]

The Course of love

The Course of Love Sculpture using faceted Lenticular panels, with Found Boat Setouchi Triennale | Honjima (2019) Setouchi Triennale | Honjima wataru funa-bito / the boatman lost the rudder. kaji-wo tae / the boat is now adrift yukue mo shiranu / not knowing where it goes. koi no michi kana / is this the course […]

In the Open or in Stealth

In the Open or in Stealth Installation MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2018) A realignment of resources, technologies, and energies is taking place. The intimationof this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled.The exhibition is a fabricatory tracing indeterminate spaces and moving between tenses, all of which murmur at each other like distant lovers. […]

Deep Breath

Sometimes, the finding of an antidote to the most basic and lethal form of amnesia, ‘the forgetting of air’, may require the undertaking of a deep dive.

Dohas for Doha

Dohas for Doha Five Videos, LED screens, variable dimensions Still More World, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art | Doha (2019) Dohas woven by Kabir, Rahim sees them in the Stars Raqs finds them everywhere, in Doha and in Mars This doha talks in shadow speech Where words fail Raqs, let commas reach When nothing […]

Not Yet At Ease

Not Yet At Ease premiered at FirstSite, Colchester as part of the 1914-18 Now Commissions: a series of new artistic works commemorating a century of the First World War. 

Provisions for everybody (film)

Provisions for Everybody Shown at: AV Festival, Newcastle (2018)| Project 88, Mumbai (2018)| Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) Single screen, Video, FurnitureDuration, 50′ 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, […]

Provisions for everybody

Provisions for Everybody Installation: 3 Videos, large drawing print, 3 dhurrie banners, drawings on vinyl, found furnitureAV Festival, Newcastle (2018), ‘Still More World’ Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) “Coal Mine. Windmill. Sugarcane Field. Words. Pictures. Memes. It’s all about energy; everything is burning.” “How not to write slow poisoning love letters to life?”, […]

The necessity of Infinity

The Necessity of Eternity recounts what must be one of the most exciting yet neglected exchanges (Al-As’Ilah Wa’L-Ajwibah/Questions and Answers) in the intellectual history of the world.

The Blood of Stars

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.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes & Hollowgram

The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2017) Shortlisted for fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square 3D printed PLA Plastic and cast polyester resin What, would the departure of power from a Trafalgar Square pedestal look like? The Emperor’s Old Clothes is an answer to this question in sculptural form. What we intend to place on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is […]

The Translator’s Silence

The Translator’s Silence Three lenticular panels, 22 inches x 36.6 inches each Lines of Control: the Partition as Productive Space, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2012)

Utsushimi

Utsushimi (2017 – ongoing)  Double Image / Token / Emanation Materialized Architectural Drawing in Illuminated Wireframe  Site specific installation at Suzu City, Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan

Undoing walls

Undoing Walls| 2017 1’ 55” Animation loop, Variable Dimensions Can a “dysfunctional” wall structure be imagined so as to question the original intentions of a Government? Can a “welcoming” and useful wall be created; one that serves the communities that it is meant to separate and which proposes an alternative solution to human segregation, when […]

Will you, Beloved Stranger

Will you, Beloved Stranger? is a performance piece for two readers in a designed setting featuring a rendition of two bodies of poetic work — those of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (writing in Hebrew) and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (writing in Arabic)

The Fruits of Labour

Fruits of Labour (2012) 100 orange fruit trees, industrial sizes fans, framed copies of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar | Public Art Project at REAKT: Olhares e Processos, Guimaraes Approaching the sense of exhaustion and hopelessness of the end of a factory’s life cycle, the artists established a link between a call published in a newspaper […]

Forthcoming titles

Three unwritten books, each marking a whimsical relationship to specific influential texts (by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Illyich Lenin and Antonio Gramsci) in the canon of Marxism, find their place amongst a set of echoing titles in a carefully laid out miniature library

Reverse Engineering the Euphoria Machine

Euphoria Machine is the name we give to the apparatus of desire and cognition that seeks to create a consensus within society for boundless energy and wealth, and effaces all doubts and dissent about the ways in which this energy and wealth must be acquired.

Revoltage

Revoltage Shown at: Project 88, Mumbai (2010) | Reading Light’, Festival d’Automne, Espace Oscar Niemeyer, Paris (2011) | Art Unlimited Basel (2012) | Tel Aviv Museum (2012) | Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst, Unna (2014) | NGMA, New Delhi (2014) Text, lightbulbs, fixtures, acrylic, wire, synchroniser Revoltage fills the space it occupies with warmth, light, and […]

Proverbs

Proverbs Cured MDF, LED lights, wooden frame, lighting sequencer Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011). Lado A Lado (India – Side by Side), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2012). “Proverbs” is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships. Money, Power, Time, Emotion, Regret, Laughter, Memory are the […]

Casebook

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Surjection by Raqs Media Collective of New Delhi, held at the Art Gallery of York University from 22 September through 4 December, 2011, and curated by Philip Monk.

Strikes At Time

‘Strikes at Time’ is a lucid dream. It takes readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night to take back the night.

The Rest of Now

The Rest of Now Text by Raqs, published in “Manifesta 7 COMPANION”, one of three publications accompanying Manifesta 7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective

The Knots that Bind are the Knots that Fray

In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne.Raqs treats found footage of the last voyage of the ship-building cranes down the Tyne river (shot by an engineer and amateur shipyard enthusiast) to create a world of passages, transitions and departures.

The Capital of Accumulation

The Capital of Accumulation is a video installation that writes an oblique narrative of the relationship between metropolises and the world in counterpoint to Rosa Luxemburg’s exceptional critique of global political economy, ‘The Accumulation of Capital’.

The surface of each day is a different planet

The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet | 2009Film (38 minutes)Art Now: Lightbox | Tate Britain Stories leak, histories collide. Bones, bodies, faces, and handwriting blur. Crowds gather and move. Open-ended and anti-documentary, The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet builds sequential scenarios that move across time and space, while considering collectivity, anonymity […]

Anonymous Steel Worker

Every factory has a time book. The time book is an index of the value of a worker’s time. It records hours, minutes and money, and acts as the memory machine of a factory.

However Incongruous

However Incongruous | 2011 Fibreglass (160 x 92 x 320 cm) | Print Albrecht Dürer came across rumors of the Indian rhinoceros named Gainda sometime in 1515 that he would immortalize in his woodcut, Rhinoceros. Gainda the rhinoceros, far from his native habitat in the grasslands of Gujarat (where no rhinoceroses remains today), was sadly lost at […]

The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason

The Mathematics Of Anacoustic Reason Inkjet print, 182 x 120 cm Print containing images, text and mathematical symbols arranged in the form of an equation. “Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality” (a project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist), NOW WHAT: Democracy and Contemporary Art, Space Hamilton and Insa Art Space, Seoul (2006) The Mathematics […]

The K.D.Vyas Correspondence

The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1 is an installation that embodies an epistolary enigma. The basis of this work are a set of eighteen ‘letters’ between Raqs and a person or entity who is identified as K.D. Vyas, sometime redactor of the Mahabharata.

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason | 2005Installation with 1 projection, 4 screens, 4 dialogues, 4 lecterns, 4 benches with embedded speakers, lightbox | Exhibited at India Contemporary, Venice Biennale (2005), Thermocline of Art, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2007), There has been a change of plan, Nature Morte, New Delhi (2006)  A Measure of […]

5 Pieces of Evidence

5 Pieces of Evidence | 2003/ Installation with 5 video screens, audio, and steel armature  5 Pieces of Evidence reflects on missing persons, urban myths, transitoriness, maps, and global networks. The five screens are narratively organized along the lines of a “whodunit.” Missing persons notices, street maps, demographic statistics, and images of pipelines, rail tracks, harbours, and […]