Practice is the daily ‘work’ (as verb) of art. It represents the sum of all the moves – practical, conceptual, affective, cognitive, philosophical, analytical and aesthetic – that occupies/de-occupies the state of our triangulation at any given point of time. Being contingent, this practice is a shape-shifting thing, prone to surprise itself as much it surprises others. Like a mycelial inhabitation, indeterminate and unbounded, it expands.
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The Waves Are Rising features an animated augmented reality (AR) wave on a large scale LED screen, superimposed upon live video feed video of the still waters of The Royal Docks, filling the vista of the usually calm waterscape with an animated surging wave as well as detritus and data from the high seas.
As time refracts, its shatter illuminates differing strands. A comic’s contempt, her whisper of laughter, threatens the consensus.
The only actually shared sensation is the present continuous tense. It reconstitutes, everyday, the coarse fabric of being human, rearranging the atoms of collective experience.
If the big, open sky is a canopy for the tumult of birds and angels, then under which roof does the flight of the ferment of our times soar? Tent cities spring from the streets and in squares like so many umbrellas of refuge and rebellion. This can be a way to re-read the history […]
The Sovereign and its CompanyShown at: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) Velvet, silkscreen, wallpaper150 cm x 300 cm, 560 cm x 375 cm The Sovereign and its Company are multiple, and multiply formed. Anything can be deputized. The historical glory and moral authority of the sovereign and its company melts away, and then reconstitutes itself, constantly. […]
To PeopleShown at: Mathaf, Doha (2019) 11 Textile and 2 Prints on paper,100 x 500 cm each Eleven hand-woven carpets and two paper prints are hung throughout the gallery, cascading to the ground. The forms that inhabit the woven textiles represent a mass, a collective, or a network of people as an interlaced, connected weave. […]
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.
A thicket is a concentration of living matter. In forests, gardens, and fields, thickets rise where different plant species find it possible to thrive together in a wild celebration of life itself. Conversations too can have thickets; points of intersection of lines of force. Raqs Media Collective’s presence at Tate Exchange (December 14 – 20, […]
The diver, maybe she is a specter, maybe he is a submarine apparition. Diving, we are closer to the surface of the earth than an astronaut, but the paradoxical nature of a submarine horizon makes for an experience that envelopes and recedes at the same time. We could recognize this paradox as key to an awareness of our experience of the contemporary.
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.
This architectural installation speaks to the evolution of materials and living forms across alternative time epochs.
he Return of Tipoo’s Tiger is a communiqué from the far future channeled by the Raqs Media Collective into the Victoria & Albert Museum for “Collecting Europe” a programme conceived by the Goethe Institute, London and the V&A Museum.
Meanwhile Elsewhere | 2014 Words, Clock-face Design on Vinyl Raqs Media Collective Berlin | Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh What begins with our eyes, travels to the brain, courses to our heart, and then returns to our eyes. Reading a feeling or a moment is something that happens between different aspects of consciousness. Reading off the walls […]
The seven billion people of the planet are animated today as they have never been before — with possibilities, propositional forms, and with an entirely new morphology and vocabulary of solidarity.
The Bureaux of Raqs and Faqs takes the form of an onsite performance installation. It takes off from the fact that one of the ways in which the word ‘Raqs’, in the name of the collective, has been sometimes mistakenly parsed is as the acronym RAQS, ‘Rarely Asked Questions’, as opposed to ‘FAQS’ or ‘Frequently Asked Questions
Two works- Art in the Age of Collective Intelligence & If The World was a Fair Place
The Museum of Lost Constellations is an attempt to recover thirteen of them into memory through a set of objects that recall the names and lore connected to each lost constellation.
The Last International is a conduit to reach the future and its freedom, which is already present in our time as its biggest public secret — a world beyond Capital.
The rooms are as alike, or as apart, as investment and insurance, two mechanisms designed to administer, anticipate and forestall, risk, speculation and the possibility of boom and bust. Does the imprint of one room on another indicate caution or audacity?
A History of Photography Shown at: ‘Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) Six photographic prints2 x 2 ft. each Reading the censored letters of soldiers from the Indian sub-continent writing home in the First World War becomes a way to make a picture of the world. In this work, a selection […]
The Great Bare Mat gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, mat-weights (2nd century BC) China that served to weigh down carpets on which debaters would sit and argue philosophical points
In The House of Everything and Nothing, Raqs translates their conversation traffic into a texture that clads the surface for the Gujral house in Jor Bagh, New Delhi.
Raqs explores the idea of leftover, the post-mortem of industry and labour, as well as the sensory and imaginative connotations that the sentence fruits of labour may generate.
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
Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms – an assemblage of metallic forms attached etched to twelve clear, coloured acrylic plinths, emerged as a gesture of reciprocity
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.
A quorum of players face off across a long well lit table over an abundant flow of wine in a play of words and thought.
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.
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 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.
Can You Say That Again? (5 Uneasy Pieces) features an intimate portable outdoor audio theater, framed by the “Exit” glyph of the walking man and the narration of five episodes of anchorage and dislocation. Part public furniture, part listening station.
The Things That Happen When Falling in Love brings together suggestions of words, and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces.
When the Scales Fall from Your Eyes dismantles our obsessions with measurement and quantifiable evaluation by gathering scales that set out to weigh impossibilities.
The sculptural installation The Reserve Army examines the intersection of a personal artistic practice (in this case, that of the early 20th Century Indian sculptor Ram Kinkar Baij) with the construction of icons to represent the newly independent nation-state, as well as the rather clumsy union of Modernism and a traditional, folkloric Indian culture.
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 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’
Raqs imagined Gainda as a fiberglass life-size sculpture of Albrecht Dürer’s etching transformed into a carousel carriage.
The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment
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 Delhi) and the architectural firm Atelier Bow Wow (Tokyo
