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.
This essay investigates how the “foreground” of late capitalism—defined by ubiquitous automation, productivity triumphalism, and competitive edges—both shapes and erases social landscapes. Through a two‑act framework, Raqs first analyses the seismic shifts in the dispersal and connections in theproduction process and technology deployment. The second act examines the “production of residue”: which expressed itself with […]
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 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.
Read By, Written By is a poetry book compiled to accompany the Bonniers Konsthall 2017 exhibition, ‘The Image of War’
51 Personae expands on the possibilities of the 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counterarguments, and Stories curated by Raqs Media Collective
PresentomorrowExhibited at Mondialité (2017) Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza, Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels Installation with Video, still Images and Animated Text Presentomorrow brings together echoes from Raqs’ earlier installations and engages with the writings of Édouard Glissant. The work reflects on the layered nature of language and thought; how the concepts we […]
In a dialogue between a deep‑sea diver and a shipwrecked rhinoceros, this text reframes the present as a drifting, submarine horizon—one that arrives unevenly across contexts and often eludes capture, unlike the more predictable arc of the future. Drawing on maritime and temporal metaphors, the essay assembles a cast of figures—from the wise to the […]
Raqs opens by asking “Who is Memory For?” and invokes Plotinus to suggest memory lives for those who have forgotten . A chance encounter at Paris’s Musée Guimet before a Banteay Srei frieze evokes a paradoxical mix of estrangement and familiarity, tracing a narrative that began in 200 B.C. and traveled thousands of miles and […]
An Interview with Raqs on curating the 2016 Shanghai Biennale and how it fits into their curatorial practice. An interview with Raqs, by Maya Kóvskaya, first published in the September/October 2016 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.
Text by Raqs, Published under ‘Superhumanity’ for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, 2016
Luminous WillSolo ExhibitionSchool 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 […]
The title for this biennale takes the form of a call and a question. This biennale sends out a call, and it asks a question: ‘Why Not Ask Again?’ The phrase is both a demand and a query. It demands that we ask questions, repeatedly if necessary, but it also implies a simple query – […]
Rhode Island School of Design invited Raqs Media Collective to serve as Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar Fellows in RISD’s Painting Department. In response, Raqs designed a thirty-day open studio in the RISD Museum centered on marginalia.
Text by Raqs, Published in ‘Take on Art: Studio’, Issue 17, March 2015
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