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
Unruly Iris of Dissent (U.I.D 2)Shown at: ‘Archeology of the self: Archives, Anarchives & the Artist‘, Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2023) Projection of Video Loop 12 years after The Untold Intimacy of Digits (2011), which animated a nineteenth century Bengali peasant’s handprint found in a London archive into a spectral count towards infinity, Raqs […]
Upright board with an inscribed ‘Infra-Vocabulary’ of a selection from Raqs Media Collective’s synonyms for capital, taken from their work – ‘A Dying Man Sings of That which Felled Him’ (installation with video and inscriptions, 2006) which was subsequently published in their book, ‘Seepage’ (Sternberg Press, 2009)
The clock in the poster is an embodiment of assurance, the opposite of alarm
An imagined conversation between real, embodied and artificial forms of intelligence, set in a moment of respite on a working day.
A suite of six uniquely colourful lenticular prints offer a dance of terse imperatives at the intersection of will and necessity
While retrieving the time gained in searching for all that is lost and found one can admit to a condition that one suspects that one shares with most people in the world today, of being lost, in search of time.
Corrections to the First Draft of History ‘rewrites’ on newsprint of the world so as to speak of making new sets of meanings for what is considered history in our present times.
The work speaks to how we encounter violence, and how we need not
A sailor, a prostitute, a city, the search for warmth, and a slice of snatched time; Shore Leave is a short story in words and images about words and the unsaid, about desire and the incalculability of longing
Seven photographic prints trace the journey of an illuminated vehicle across a liminal landscape
Proverbs is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships
The Librarian’s Lucid Dream is a wallpaper carnival of impossible books made up of the index card entries for an imaginary library
Speculating on the concept of time, Time is Money intertwines financial and political matters related to capitalism with ontological issues related to ephemerality and permanence
Surface Tension Studies is a suite of photographs which considers making choices between unfathomable depth and a distant horizon, encountering the strong pull of submerged currents, the attractions of beaching on unnamed islands, and the modest comfort of anchorage
Skirmish is a brief, unhappy, love story with pictures and text, another of Raqs’ forays into the photo-roman form
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks
A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of Europe, pointing away, below a band of flat colors, an array of would-be flags
Utopia is a Hearing Aid features images of the ear superscribed repeatedly with the statement “Utopia is a Hearing Aid”
Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check posts, evictions, phone booths, bus stations, cyclists and communication infrastructure are positioned in counterpoint to legal excerpts and administrative notes
