An Interview
The Collective Eye interviews Raqs Media Collective and delves deep into their early days, influences, and experiences. They discuss a wide range of works from ‘Coronation Park’ in 2015 to the public commission, ‘All, Human’ in 2023.
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.
Planktons in the Sea: A Few Questions Regarding the Qualities of Time
e-flux journal #27, September 2011, Raqs Media Collective
Response by Raqs
Monuments Must Fall Issue #24, British Art Studies (Conversation Piece convened by Edwin Coomasaru)
An Infra-vocabulary for Capital
An Infra-vocabulary for Capital (2023) Vinyl on wall, dimensions variable Further Annotation to ‘Notations on Time’ by Raqs Media Collective at Ishara Foundation, Dubai Upright board with an inscribed ‘Infra-Vocabulary’ of a selection from Raqs […]
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
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
Hungry for Time An invitation to epistemic disobedience with Raqs Media CollectiveArt Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2021-2022) The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has undergone a fundamental renovation and modernization and […]
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. […]
Hungry
for
Time
An invitation to epistemic disobedience with Raqs Media Collective, in the Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Freeing the weight of the habitual
Text by Raqs, published in Curatography, Issue 2, Curators Living Rooms, Curating Asia International, 2021
The event-shaped hole and the photographic image
Text by Raqs, published in the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 30 No. 61-62 (2021): The Changing Ontology of the Image
Making bets while knowing nothing
Text by Raqs, published in The Collections Book, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Afterglow:
Yokohama Triennale
2020
Exhibition Catalogue
The Double Act of Flower-Time
Text by Raqs, published in Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, editors Cameron Cartiere + Leon Tan, 2021
Ten nonillion particles and Five Million Incidents
Text by Raqs, published by the Goethe Institut, 2020
Recensions, without Originals
Text by Raqs
Text by Raqs, for Untranslatable Terms of Cultural Practices: A Shared Vocabulary, 2021
In the Open or in Stealth
In the Open or in Stealth Installation MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2018) A realignment of resources, technologies, and energies is taking place. The intimationof this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled.The exhibition […]
21 Personae
21 Personae is an extension of the 51 Personae project curated by Raqs Media Collective for the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17). In Barcelona, the project coincides with the In the Open or in Stealth 2018 – 17 March 2019), curated for MACBA by Raqs Media Collective and coordinated by Hiuwai Chu
“With Respect to Residue”. Raqs Media Collective, Decolonial Museum as UFO
Text by Natasha Eaton, on Raqs’s work. Published in Third Text online Forum: Decolonial Imaginaire
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective Exhibition K21, Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018) The point of departure for this exhibition is Raqs’ continual fascination with time, a topic that has preoccupied the members of the group […]
Not yet at ease
Not Yet At Ease | 2018 Installation, Sound, Video, Treated Archival Footage and Photographs, Interpreted Documents FirstSite, Colchester, United Kingdom (2018) and ‘Spinal’, Firth Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019) Invoking transcripts of letters and […]
Provisions for everybody
Provisions for Everybody Installation: 3 Videos, large drawing print, 3 dhurrie banners, drawings on vinyl, found furnitureAV Festival, Newcastle (2018), ‘Still More World’ Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) “Coal Mine. Windmill. Sugarcane Field. […]
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’ […]
Protest as Polyphony: An interview with Raqs Media Collective
Interview with Raqs by Melissa Karmen Lee, published in ASAP/Journal vol. 3.2, 2018
To Ask when Empty, To pour when Full
Text by Raqs, “On the aestheticization of Politics”
WHAT TIME IS IT
Technologies of Life in the Contemporary (14th – 16th December, 2017), Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi; Conference Conveners: Ravi Sundaram, Ravi Vasudevan (Sarai-CSDS) + Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta); Conference Coordinators: Farah Batool (Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan), Satakshi Sinha (Sarai-CSDS)
51 Personae
51 Personae expands the possibilities of the 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counterarguments, and Stories curated by Raqs Media Collective, as a series of gatherings that took place in different parts of Shanghai between 12 November 2016 and 12 March 2017.
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 […]
We are here but is it now? (The submarine horizons of contemporaneity)
Text by Raqs, published as a monograph for “The Contemporary Condition” series, series editors Geoff Cox + Jacob Lund, 2017
Why
Not
Ask
Again?
Arguments, Counter- arguments, and Stories, 11th Shanghai Biennale
Edited by Power Station of Art and Raqs Media Collective + Shveta Sarda
Published by China Academy of Art Press (2016)
Propositioning the World: Raqs Media Collective and the Shanghai Biennale
Interview with Maya Kóvskaya
As if by design
Text by Raqs, published under “Superhumanity” for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial
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 […]
Art as place: A proposition
Editor’s note: 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 […]
It’s Possible Because It’s Possible
It’s Possible Because It’s Possible 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 […]
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 […]
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, New Delhi (2014).
{ INSERT 2014 }
Draft for an Operating Manual, Score for Choreography, Plan for an Exhibition
Catalogue
An Ephemeris, Corrected for the Longitudes of Tomorrow: Speculations on the Orbit and Motion of Objects and Processes in Contemporary Art, today, and tomorrow.
Text by Raqs. Published in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Editors Jill H. Casid + Aruna D’ Souza. Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown & Yale University Press, 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 […]
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, […]
ART AS A PLACE
Workbook by Raqs Media Collective with Kaushik Bhowmik, a digital publishing serious (2013)
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 […]
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 […]
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 Sarai archive (in-house at Sarai-CSDS). P.T.O. is an edited, highlighted and resequenced version of these works, to bring alive the various dimensions and modalities of thinking and making. It is not an exhaustive summary of the diverse work done by the Fellows. (Shveta, Delhi, 2012)
A history of infinity and some fresh catastrophes: On Raqs Media Collective’s The Capital of Accumulation
Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, eflux journal #38
A letter to Amália Jyran, who will be fifty-four in 2061 CE
Text by Raqs, written to accompany Raqs’ contribution to the Momentum Nordic Biennale of 2011
Time Capsule from 2011 (TO BE OPENED IN 2061)
Time Capsule from 2011 (TO BE OPENED IN 2061) Aluminum box with contents (39 x 29 x 32 cm) 6th Momentum Biennial, Moss, Norway (2011)
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Frame of Mind: Researching Documentaries
Text by Raqs
Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode
Text by Raqs
Raqs Media Collective:
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.
Within the Flux of the Contemporary. Parul Dave Mukherjee in conversation with Raqs Media Collective
Published in Gimme Shelter: Global Discourses in Aesthetics, editors: Jos de Mul + Renée van de Vali, 2011
Additions, Subtractions: On Collectives and Collectivities
Text by Raqs, in Manifesta Journal #8, 2009
Now and Elsewhere
e-flux journal #12 2010
Text by Raqs
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
SEEPAGE
Publisher: Sternberg Press (2010)
The Things that Happen when Falling in Love
The Things that Happen when Falling in Love Installation with 18 coloured and clear acrylic figures with printed mirrored letters, wire cables, 7 video screens, 13 photographs Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) […]
Escapement
Escapement Installation with 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped, dimensions variable Frith Street Gallery, London (2009) Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones […]
EMOTIONAL CARTOGRAPHY
TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF
Text by Raqs
How to be an artist by night
Text by Raqs
Published in in Art School : Propositions for the Twentieth Century, Edited by Steven Madoff. MIT Press, Boston, 2009
The Flights of the Pink Flamingo or Historiae Sub-Rosae of Capital and the Twentieth Century
Text by Kaushik Bhaumik, on Raqs Media Collective’s video diptych “The Capital of Accumulation”, published in ‘Art India’, Vol XV, Issue III, Quarter III, 2010
STAMMER, MUMBLE, SWEAT, SCRAWL, AND TIC
Text by Raqs, published in e-flux journal #0 November 2008
Fact, Facticity and the Imagination
Text by Raqs
Aswatthama – an Entry for the Dictionary of War at Graz, October 2006
Text by Raqs
Published in System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2007
Digressions from the Memory of a Minor Encounter
Text by Raqs
Published in The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, 2006
Once again, to the distant observer
Text by Raqs, published in SubContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Catalogue accompanying the exhibition
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 […]
Dreams and Disguises, As Usual.
Text by Raqs. Published in ‘Impostor in the Waiting Room’, the publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition, Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, 2004
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 […]
New Maps & Old Territories: A dialogue between Yagnavalkya and Gargi in Cyberia
Text by Raqs
Published in Sarai Reader 01, The Public Domain, Sarai CSDS, Delhi 2001