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.
.MOV.ESSAYS | .MP4.PLUS | DEVICES | GATHERINGS | INTERFERENCES | INTERRUPTIONS | LEXICA | LOOPS | UNLEDGERED
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 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 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)
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.
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)
The Namak Haram’s Philosophy, Revised Treated Photographic Diptych, 96.6 inches x 24.4 inches Words, A user’s manual, Gallery 320, New Delhi (2012) Every book demands another, but not all of them get written. Every debt demands to be paid, but not all are redeemed. Then there are the debts that we owe to the all that we read, which […]
One Meter of Truth (Emotion) Steel table with wooden top, printed canvas (58”x 58”, 1m steel measure) ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, NGMA (2014) 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 tangent to the way in […]
Log Book Entry Before Storm Site specific transformation In ‘Whorled Explorations’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi 2014 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. The work re-introduces circulation into this still […]
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 Untold Intimacy of Digits Looped video projection (00:47 minutes) Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2011); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011); Museum fur Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt (2012); NGMA, Delhi (2014); K21, Düsseldorf (2018) In every sum figured by power, a remainder haunts the calculation. Not everything adds up. A people are never […]
An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale looped video projection (3:30 minutes) Exhibited at Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011); The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2012)
The Knots that Bind are the Knots that Fray 7 channel video installation, varying lengths Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010); Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Noida, U.P (2012) In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were […]
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, there stands an emptied out torpedo car that once transported hot molten pig iron to a steel factory across a river on rail tracks.
There Has Been A Change Of Plan 2006/ Photographs on Hahnemuhle FInArt paper. Series of 4, each 96 x 137 cm There has been a change of plan, Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi (2006) There has been a change of plan features enigmatic images of aircraft abandoned in a dessert blossoming after a rain shower. […]
2005/ Installation with shoes, astroturf, and video projections | Exhibited at Citizens, Pitzhanger Manor House, London (2005); The City Gallery, Leicester (2005); Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales (2005); Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; (2005). Lost New Shoes confronts the notion of the ‘citizen’ by looking at the absence or void where a person may be. One way of […]
3-screen video & sound installation, with images, text and transcripts of a simulated chat room conversation | 2003 In this installation (which also doubles as a piece of text-based one-act electronic theatre), transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and […]
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 […]
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE WORK OF ART
Carved marble panel, postcards, wall text
