The word ‘para’ gestures to a relationship to that which a thing stands beside, or at a tangent to. In our ‘para-practices’ are writings that we do, and conversations that we enter into, alongside. It could be the making of a Sourcebook for staging public discursive moments for a plural knowledge world, or a Curation, a processual duration with many to re-apprehend the world, or a Studio with students to reimagine the power of margins or thresholds. 

The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone

The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, published by Jencks Foundation (2023), takes the form of an artist book, and foregrounds text over image. Mirroring the film’s visual textures, the five voices in the pamphlet register varying distances from what is seen on the screen and its potential elucidations: voiceover, description of images, words on screen, added layers of annotations and meta-annotations.

An Interview

The Collective Eye interviews Raqs Media Collective and delves deep into their early days, influences, and experiences

An Infra-vocabulary for Capital

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) 

Practising Collectivity:
What is possible and
not yet forbidden?

Published in CURARE – Curatorial Studies by Ute Müller-Tischler and Solvej Helweg Ovesen  The CURARE Reader is published as part of the CAMPI Curating and Management in Public Institutions program of the District Office for Mitte in Berlin, Office for Further Education and Culture, The Department of Art, Culture and History 

Yours, Sincerely (2022)

Essay as a part of Half-Life, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Art Institute of Chicago within the context of its exhibition “Static Range” by Himali Singh Soin

Hungry for Time

An invitation to epistemic disobedience with Raqs Media Collective
Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2021-2022)

The Laughter of Tears

The Laughter of Tears | 2021 Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany  When we are in the sonic range of the flightpaths of a flock of birds returning to a roosting site, we become intimate with their together-ness. When people are awestruck by wonder, or tickled into laughter, or moved to tears, they momentarily transmit to each other […]

Salt

Raqs works with salt, or that refers to salt, as material or concept. The inquiry started from “Salt”, a photo-essay published in The Drama Review, Volume 65 Issue 4, 2021. Salt, The Drama Review, Volume 65 Issue 4, 2021 (download) A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission Single screen, Video, 18:04 minutes “Provisions for Everybody” at […]

Hungry for Time

An invitation to epistemic disobedience with Raqs Media Collective, in the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2021

salt

Text and image essay by Raqs, published in The Drama Review, Volume 65 Issue 4, 2021

Thickets

Text by Raqs, published in “Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice”, 2021

In the Open or in Stealth

A realignment of resources, technologies, and energies is taking place. The intimation of this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled. The exhibition is a fabricatory tracing indeterminate spaces and moving between tenses, all of which murmur at each other like distant lovers

21 Personae

21 Personae is an extension of the 51 Personae project curated by Raqs Media Collective for the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17)

Everything Else is Ordinary

Everything Else is Ordinary delves into the elusive, multifaceted nature of time and how it shapes our existence. Raqs explores the concept of time not as a singular, linear force but as a series of intersecting moments that reflect our complex relationships with labor, memory, and each other. The exhibition interweaves various elements of daily life with philosophical reflections.


Not Yet At Ease

Not Yet At Ease premiered at FirstSite, Colchester as part of the 1914-18 Now Commissions: a series of new artistic works commemorating a century of the First World War. 

Provisions for everybody

With Provisions for Everybody, Raqs offers a weave of thoughts found on the the road; as well as images, calculations, texts, textures and textiles which accompany and aid the the task of re-imagining the relation between potential and plenitude.

Thicket

A thicket is a concentration of living matter. In forests, gardens, and fields, thickets rise where different plant species find it possible to thrive together in a wild celebration of life itself. Conversations too can have thickets; points of intersection of lines of force.  Raqs Media Collective’s presence at Tate Exchange (December 14 – 20, […]

Provisions

Project 88 (Mumbai) 2018 “everything is burning” Raqs Media Collective returns to Project 88, Mumbai with “Provisions”, an exhibition that brings together the premiere in India of an ambitious recent video travelogue, ‘Provisions for Everybody’ (2018), as well as a new body of work — photo/text/objects that embody an agile and playful skepticism towards the […]

WHAT TIME IS IT

Published in conjunction to the Technologies of Life in the Contemporary (14th – 16th December, 2017), Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi

Twilight Language

Twilight Language signals a lighthouse semaphore for all that is lost and found between errant longitudes, infected histories and contagious futures. This is the time when everything changes; memorials defect, communards bake biscuits, moths mutate, divers rise, clocks speak in tongues. Animals, machines, and humans recover grounds of equality and conversation. Words turn incandescent, enigma shadows everything, twilight finds its language. 

51 Personae

51 Personae expands on the possibilities of the 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counterarguments, and Stories curated by Raqs Media Collective

Presentomorrow

Presentomorrow Installation with Video, Still Images and Animated Text Exhibited at Mondialité curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza, Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels 2017 The installation presented within the framework of Mondialité makes references to several of their previous installations and to the writings of Édouard Glissant. It evokes the fact that the concepts, the […]

Luminous Will

Luminous Will School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015) Does history repeat itself, or simply rehearse its moves in anticipation? Can we read chronicles in terms of deferrals and déjà-vu rather than in terms of climaxes and closures?  “Luminous Will” refers to an eponymous work by Raqs Media Collective, where the hands of […]

Art as place: A proposition 

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.

It’s Possible Because It’s Possible

It’s Possible Because It’s Possible Shown at: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayos (CA2M), Madrid (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico (2015); Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires (2015) It’s Possible Because It’s Possible is the fruit of a collaboration between Museo Universitario Art Contemporaneo (MUAC), the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), and the Fundacion […]

Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar

Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) Media rich, concept driven, formally multi-faceted, playful, urgent, replete with philosophical density – this is the kind of art that addresses all our faculties – intellectual, emotional and sensory. A visitor to this exhibition is invited to be a witness, to see himself and […]

With an Untimely Calendar

Edited by Shveta Sarda, Published by the National Gallery of Modern Art in conjunction with the solo exhibition of Raqs Media Collective, Asamayavali/ Untimely Calendar, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 2014.

Extra Time

Extra Time Chronus Centre, Shanghai (2013) Extra Time opened as the chronic Art Center’s inaugural show. The show focuses on Raqs’ investigations of time and temporality in different registers that span the spectrum of their diverse practice ranging from performance, to installation, architectural ensembles, video, and photography. By creating striking constellations of images, by using […]

Blood Of Stars: A walk in ten scenes

Site specific intervention at the Statsberget Cave Single screen, Video, 13 minutes  Extracts from a Future History | Lulea  The Blood of Stars invites us to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it reads meteorites […]

A Phrase, Not a Word

A Phrase, Not a Word Exhibition with videos, large-scale prints, a typographic sculpture and a sound installation Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi (2012) With “A Phrase, Not A Word”, Raqs’ diverse and eclectic practice becomes a playground for ideas and reflections on conversations and the notion of language. The exhibition gathers an arsenal of images, objects, voices, […]

Guesswork

Guesswork Frith Street Gallery, London (2012) The works featured in Guesswork invite the viewer to consider what it means to measure infinity and to seize time rather than to be captive to the passing moment. By working with pixels and proverbs, circuits and syntax, Raqs turn thoughts into images and images into questions. The works ask us […]

The Great Bare Mat and Constellation

The Great Bare Mat and Constellation Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston (2012) The “Great Bare Mat” of the title refers to a carpet made for the exhibition, a surface for the staging of conversations, displayed at the base of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-part 17th century Japanese screen from the Museum’s Collection.  The carpet’s repeated […]

P.T.O

Presented by Shveta Sarda This book is an appreciation of the listening, walking, reading, interviewing, collecting, questioning, mapping, recording, drawing, image-making and writing done by the hundreds of Independent Fellows associated with Sarai over the last decade. The works by the Fellows have been publicly archived through postings in the Sarai Reader-list and in the […]

Seen at Secunderabagh 

Seen at Secunderabagh | 2011 With Zuleikha Chaudhari Performative installation with actors, video projection, sets The starting point for Seen at Secundrabagh is a photograph taken in 1857 by the war photographer Felice Beato three months after a bloody mutiny within the British East India Company. Four men and a horse pose in front of the lens, […]

Reading Light

Reading Light Siege du Parti Communiste Francaise, Festival d’Automne, Paris (2011) Reading Light – the work presented by Raqs in Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic building for the French Communist Party at the Place Colonel Fabien – was a set of illuminated signs that use text, typography, light sources and electricity to conjure a renewal of human aspirations. […]

Surjection

How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon, Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm 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 step of […]

Casebook

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Surjection by Raqs Media Collective of New Delhi, held at the Art Gallery of York University from 22 September through 4 December, 2011, and curated by Philip Monk

The Rest of Now

The Rest of Now Text by Raqs, published in “Manifesta 7 COMPANION”, one of three publications accompanying Manifesta 7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective

Escapement

Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does it mean to be living in these times, in these quickening hours, these accumulating minutes, these multiplying seconds, here, now?

TIME BOOK

Time Book, Exhibition Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) Special thanks to the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, Homestead, PA. Hanging on the wall across from the entrance are four non-working factory time clocks. The hand of each clock is set to the digits: 1-9-8-6, the year a number of steel mills in the area closed. An […]

The Imposter in the Waiting Room

The Imposter in the Waiting Room Installation with video, photography, performance, text, sound and print Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2004). National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014) The Impostor in the Waiting Room is a consideration on what happens when modernity encounters its shadow. As a group of practitioners who navigate routes in and […]

The History & Practice of Cinematography in India

The History & Practice of Cinematography in India is a collection of transcripts of interviews with veteran and working cameramen, texts, archival photographs, production stills, bibliography, a timeline and other resources on the history of cinematographic practice in India.