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 uses the concept of “recension”—ongoing revision—to reflect on three decades of Raqs Media Collective’s practice amid economic turmoil, social unrest, and a mounting pandemic. Tracing moments from the creation of Sarai’s public‑sharing infrastructures and early social‑software experiments, it argues that creative and curatorial work is sustained through collective re‑apprehension, infrastructural generosity, and the […]
This essay takes a Bengali term anta(h)shira, used to denote an intravenous vein, as its starting point, treating it as a metaphor for the subtle, capillary-like currents that run through bodies and social imaginaries. The text unpacks how such culturally embedded words defy neat translation, revealing fissures in our shared vocabularies. It argues for a practice […]
Text by Natasha Eaton, on Raqs Media Collective’s work. Published in Third Text’s online Forum, ‘Decolonial Imaginaire’
An 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”
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 […]
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
Text by Raqs, Published in ‘Take on Art: Studio’, Issue 17, March 2015
Published in the e-flux journal issue #56, 2014
Text by Raqs, Published in ‘Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn’, Edited by Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’ Souza, Clask Studies in the Visual Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown & Yale University Press, 2014
Conversation between Chang Tsong-Zung and Raqs Media Collective, Published in ‘Extra Time’, Edited by Chen Yun, 2013
Text by Raqs, Published in ‘Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour’, Edited by Cecilia Widenheim, Lisa Rosendahl, Michele Masucci, Annika Enqvist and Jonathan Habib Enqvist. IASPIS, Stockholm & Sternberg Press, Berlin & New York, 2012
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