The word ‘para’ suggests a relationship to something that stands beside or runs tangential to another. Our ‘para-practices’ include writings and conversations that unfold in proximity—alongside other works, ideas, and processes. These may take the form of a ‘Sourcebook’ that helps stage public, discursive moments for a world with plural knowledge; a ‘Curation,’ the process of which unfolds with many, over time, to reapprehend the world; or a ‘Studio’ with students to reimagine the generative potential of margins and 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?

This interview reflects on the conditions, thresholds, and frictions that shape collective work—within and beyond institutions, publics, and time. Raqs draws from their own processes to consider how collectivity is practiced, stretched, and sometimes tested. The conversation thinks through the limits of what can be done together, and what remains open, despite constraint. Published in […]

Yours, Sincerely (2022)

Published 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, 2022

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 Solo ExhibitionKunstverein 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 before, […]

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

Freeing the Weight of the Habitual

This essay examines how established practices and ingrained habits can both confine and shape creative and curatorial processes. It poses the question, “What is the mechanism — and how do we seek it — of ‘freeing’ the weights of habitual narrative entrapments?” prompting questions related to the forms and premises of the “system ofgovernance” that […]