In this essay, Raqs Media Collective frames COVID‑19, noting that an estimated 10³¹ (ten nonillion) viral particles float in the air at any moment, making viruses the planet’s most abundant “bad news” relative to human ‘newsworthiness.’The text underscores how a seemingly invisible entity can reshape global social and biological networks. Through these reflections, Raqs probes how […]
This essay uses the concept of “recension”—ongoing revision—to reflect on three decades of Raqs Media Collective’s practice amid economic turmoil, social unrest, and a mounting pandemic. Tracing moments from the creation of Sarai’s public‑sharing infrastructures and early social‑software experiments, it argues that creative and curatorial work is sustained through collective re‑apprehension, infrastructural generosity, and the […]
This essay takes a Bengali term anta(h)shira, used to denote an intravenous vein, as its starting point, treating it as a metaphor for the subtle, capillary-like currents that run through bodies and social imaginaries. The text unpacks how such culturally embedded words defy neat translation, revealing fissures in our shared vocabularies. It argues for a practice […]
To have a conversation only with questions is like playing a game(chess), like a player is looking for a realm
The Course of LoveShown at: Setouchi Triennale, Honjima (2019) Sculpture using faceted Lenticular panels, with Found Boat 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 of love? – Sone-no […]
A realignment of resources, technologies, and energies is taking place. The intimation of 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
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.
The video works Dohas for Doha are illuminated proverbs that play with linguistics, light, and the transmission of knowledge
Listening: Active Presence of Aura of the Ordinary Suraj, Shamsher and Neelofar were part of the Cybermohalla Ensemble (2001-13), and co-authrored innumerable books, broadsheets, and art works with the Ensemble. Notable among them are Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis (Penguin-India, 2010, English translation of Bahurupiya Shehr, Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), and Cybermohalla […]
Text by Natasha Eaton, on Raqs Media Collective’s work. Published in Third Text’s online Forum, ‘Decolonial Imaginaire’
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 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, […]
With Provisions for Everybody, Raqs offers a weave of thoughts found on the the road; as well as images, calculations, texts, textures and textiles which accompany and aid the the task of re-imagining the relation between potential and plenitude.
An interview with Raqs by Melissa Karmen Lee, published in ASAP/Journal vol. 3.2, 2018
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