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. 

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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.

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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.

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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 

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

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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]

Hungry
for
Time

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

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

Sharing
our
Sources

Text by Raqs (and extracts from essays), in the first publication accompanying “Afterglow”, Yokohama Triennale 2020, curated by Raqs Media Collective

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Afterglow

Yokohama Triennale 17 July – 11 October 2020 Afterglow presents works that turn space into complex diagrams of thought and feeling. It comes into close contact with the ancient, rubbing against time to discern untested […]

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

Anta(h)shira

Text by Raqs, for Untranslatable Terms of Cultural Practices: A Shared Vocabulary, 2021

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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

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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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’ […]

Foreground Manoeuvres

Text by Raqs, published in Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Critical Times (2018) 1 (1): 272–276

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.

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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 […]

Memorophilia

Text accompanying the performance titled Memorophilia held at Tate Modern (2016).

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)

As if by design

Text by Raqs, published under “Superhumanity” for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial

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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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

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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 […]
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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)

Extra
Time

Conversation between Chang Tsong-Zung and Raqs Media Collective 

Published in ‘Extra Time’, editor Chen Yun. Featuring contributions by Raqs Media Collective, Chong Tzung Chang, Huang Chien Hung, Lu Xinghua, Gao Shiming, Mou Sen & Li Zhenhua, 2013

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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]

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 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)

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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 […]
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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 […]

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.

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

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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) […]

Wonderful Uncertainty

A text by Raqs, published in ‘Curating and the Educational Turn’, edited by Paul O’Neill & Nick Wilson, Open Editions, De Appel, 2010

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

Once again, to the distant observer

Text by Raqs, published in SubContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Catalogue accompanying the exhibition

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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