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), Swamp & MarshProjection of Video Loop, Variable Dimensions and, Prints (1 x 1 m)Exhibited at Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2023) 12 years after The Unlikely Intimacy of Digits (2011), which animated a nineteenth century Bengali peasant’s handprint found in a London archive into a spectral count towards infinity, […]
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)
Featured in digital posters It’s Urgent! Part II & III, Luma Westbau, Zurich 2018 The Assurance Clock The clock in the poster is an embodiment of assurance, the opposite of alarm. This is an attitude that could be seen cultivated as an antidote to the epidemic of caution and false-alarms that characterizes our time. The […]
Manga style text-image assemblage. Ten screen printed panels on newsprint. Unlimited Edition 2018 Graphics by Freddy Corasco An imagined conversation between real, embodied and artificial forms of intelligence, set in a moment of respite on a working day. First published in Wonderflux – a graphic novel anthology produced by e-Flux
To Ask, When Empty |2018 5 Lenticular Panels, 1ft. X 2ft each Project 88 | Mumbai A suite of six uniquely colourful lenticular prints offer a dance of terse imperatives at the intersection of will and necessity: “to ask when empty, to pour when full.”
Lost in Search of Time | 2015 Steel, Matt Automotive Paint, Text, Electrics | K21, Dusseldorf
Corrections to the First Draft of History Newsprint, chalkboard paint and chalk Dimensions variable Exhibited in an eponymous solo exhibition, at Frith Street Gallery, London (2014) followed by Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) In 1850, a man called Peary Churn Sarkar wrote up a primer for Bengalis to learn English with. He called it, ‘The First Book of […]
A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper 305 x 61 inches Exhibited in Clark House initiated ‘Artists Against AFSPA’ at NGMA, Mumbai (2011), ‘Waiting for the Wind’, Experimenter, Kolkata (2014) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014)
phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (Two Love Stories) Single channel projected digital slide show, gilded frame, 90 x 120 cm Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi (2012) 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 […]
How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon | Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) Seven photographic prints trace the journey of an illuminated vehicle across a liminal landscape. Neon letters, gesturing towards a terse but optimistic instruction, annotate each […]
Proverbs Cured MDF, LED lights, wooden frame, lighting sequencer Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011). Lado A Lado (India – Side by Side), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2012). “Proverbs” is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships. Money, Power, Time, Emotion, Regret, Laughter, Memory are the […]
The Librarian’s Lucid Dream Wallpaper Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Books have lost their titles, and the titles have gone astray, create dalliances with each others’ words. The Librarian’s Lucid Dream is a wallpaper carnival of impossible books made up of the index card entries for an imaginary library. In each instance, the uncanny, nagging sensation that says […]
Time is Money Prints, Series of 5, each 12 x 28 cm Impossible Exchange, Frieze Fair (2010); Time Currency, Liverpool Biennial (2010) 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. “The idea of deploying time in terms of […]
Surface Tension Studies Giclée prints on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 13, each 25 x 40 cm Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) 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 […]
phantoroman: SKIRMISH Laser-cut acrylic over inkjet on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 8, each 40 x 60 cm Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Skirmish is a brief, unhappy, love story with pictures and text, another of Raqs’ ongoing forays into the photo-roman form. Skirmish tells the story of an imagined estranged couple fighting a coded war of […]
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World Digital print on Hahnemühle FineArt pape, 89 x 41 cm Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks. Each block, repeated across the map, stands in for some superlative claim or the other on the planet and its resources. Perhaps this is a completed puzzle waiting […]
DisOrient Print on bond paper, 30 x 21 cm Part of Markus Meissen’s The Violence of Participation, 2007 Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2007); Markus Meissen, The Violence of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007) A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of […]
2003/ Posters installed in situ in Venice, Italy. 90x 60 cm (Utopia Station, Venice Biennale 2003) External link: Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming? by Raqs Media Collective e-flux journal issue #56 June 2014
28.28 N / 77.15 E : 2001/02 (Co-Ordinates, Delhi) Raqs, with Pradip Saha, translate documentary video and audio log sheets, notes, excerpts from legal document, and stickers and signs to create a matrix of meaning around questions of space, access, barriers and the law in cites today. Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check […]
