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.

Dohas for Doha

The video works Dohas for Doha are illuminated proverbs that play with linguistics, light, and the transmission of knowledge

The Emperor’s Old Clothes & Hollowgram

The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2017)Shortlisted for The 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

Fragments of texts by three South Asian poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Rabindranath Tagore, and Agha Shahid Ali, are presented in Urdu, Bengali and English, in lenticular 3D prints

Coronation Park 

Coronation Park echoes and amplifies the accidental epiphany that Raqs experienced a long time ago about the nature of power at the eponymous derelict quasi-ceremonial space where relics of the British Raj are kept for the consideration of an absent public at the outskirts of Delhi.

Plaques for Coronation Park

Circular plaques created as a part of Coronation Park (2015). They have inscribed statements adapted from George Orwell’s parable about the brittleness of Imperial authority, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936)

One Meter of Truth

One Meter of Truth (Emotion)Shown at: ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery Modern of Art (2014) Steel table with wooden top, printed canvas 58”x 58”, 1m steel measure During a rehearsal process for a work being made with theatre artists, Raqs began to seek a language for states of feeling, and the body, that were at a […]

Log Book Entry Before Storm

Log Book Entry Before Storm is a site specific installation that occupies what was once a peculiar domestic space- a single house cut in two by a concrete wall to accommodate two families

Time Interruptions (2009, 2014)

Escapement 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped Dimensions variable Escapement was first imagined in the form of Location (n) at Italy Cultural Centre, Sao Paolo; Nature Morte (2006) Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does […]

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.

Brazen (Pittsburgh Torpedo)

Brazen (2009) was displayed at The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London and New York.
In the grounds of an abandoned steel furnace, in a city that once made the greatest amount of steel in the world

A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)

In this installation transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked Upanishadic dialogue, and video recordings of a spoken English class in Delhi

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE WORK OF ART

he series of possibilities in the words that constitute the statement Please Do Not Touch the Work of Art are prised open by rearranging them to form statements of an almost identical length, that bear very different attitudes