Infra is often glossed as ‘below’ a threshold. Here we could be in conversation, or could have initiated or instigated the process, but the authorial impulse is distributed and may not even coalesce into any entity. Here our practice folds within other practices, and develops a stream that is in conversation, yet keeps moving with its own momentum. The associative density that these practices acquire over long periods is unscripted. A cursory glance at the Sarai Readers (01 to 09) over a decade will show how they attracted authors and artists from so many parts of the world, from within inner cities to insulated laboratories, from hospital intensive care units to the raging fields of protests. This sediment is what propels the world around us.

Theory Opera

Theory Opera Performances including furniture, architectural detail, podium design, performer’s platforms, projection surfaces and other functional, ornamental details Shanghai Biennale, China (2016-2017) “When theory gets to work, it sings.” For the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Raqs intended to produce a form to play out the tension that this distribution of intelligence between theory and practice creates. […]

Art as place: A proposition 

Editor’s note: The three curatorial projects City as studio, Art as a place and Common ground conceived between 2009- 2014 are an extension of Raqs’s engagement with the creative community that reimagine the questions around cultural infrastructures. (1) CITY AS STUDIO City as Studio brings together people from a range of social, cultural and media […]

Strikes At time

Strikes at Time 2 synchronized video projections with sound, 18’ 32” Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2011) Strikes at Time is a lucid dream, readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night. In that no man’s land annexed by the awakening mind from the fatigue […]