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 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 […]
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
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. Words. Pictures. Memes. It’s all about energy; everything is burning.” “How not to write slow poisoning love letters to life?”, […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Things that Happen When Falling in Love
The Things That Happen When Falling in Love brings together suggestions of words, and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces.
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 […]