Practice is the daily ‘work’ (as verb) of art. It represents the sum of all the moves – practical, conceptual, affective, cognitive, philosophical, analytical and aesthetic – that occupies/de-occupies the state of our triangulation at any given point of time. Being contingent, this practice is a shape-shifting thing, prone to surprise itself as much it surprises others. Like a mycelial inhabitation, indeterminate and unbounded, it expands.

Moon Clock

The Moon Clock is a device to tell the time. At midnight, and at noon, lies the moon. With the passing of the hours, it clocks the waxing and the waning of crimson moon-minutes

Delta

A set of four prints on metallic paper play with imagery from ‘Swamp’, ‘Marsh’, and the ‘Unruly Iris of Dissent’, and add a third element – a magnification of a falling tear drop, with traces of its salt crystals, denoting the salinity of the feelings that have us come undone.

All, Humans

All, Humans builds itself from uniquely human faculty of language to construct conceptual categories that transverse the human condition. It arcs out like a canopy – suspended between a multiplicity of minds, hearts and hands, sheltering and anticipating the universal human aspiration and claim for freedom, equality and dignity.

The Waves are Rising

The Waves Are Rising features an animated augmented reality (AR) wave on a large scale LED screen, superimposed upon live video feed video of the still waters of The Royal Docks, filling the vista of the usually calm waterscape with an animated surging wave as well as detritus and data from the high seas.

The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone 

The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Parallax Time Cone’ is an investigation into the optics of this strange and specific sensation of time, which has become second nature since 1980. It is a time traveling search, aboard an imagined and remembered bicycle.

1980 in Parallax

1980 in Parallax Exhibition at Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, United Kingdom (2023) Raqs finds correspondence with Charles Jencks’ work as designer, critic, historian, concrete poet and artist, and with his Post-Modernist manifesto and former home turned Grade I listed museum, The Cosmic House. The concept of parallax describes the changing perception of objects […]

Unruly Iris of Dissent (U.I.D 2), Swamp & Marsh

Unruly Iris of Dissent (U.I.D 2)Shown at: ‘Archeology of the self: Archives, Anarchives & the Artist‘, Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2023) Projection of Video Loop 12 years after The Untold Intimacy of Digits (2011), which animated a nineteenth century Bengali peasant’s handprint found in a London archive into a spectral count towards infinity, Raqs […]

An Infra-vocabulary for Capital

Upright board with an inscribed ‘Infra-Vocabulary’ of a selection from Raqs Media Collective’s synonyms for capital, taken from their work – ‘A Dying Man Sings of That which Felled Him’ (installation with video and inscriptions, 2006) which was subsequently published in their book, ‘Seepage’ (Sternberg Press, 2009) 

Betaal / बे-ताल / Arrhythmic

Betaal / बे-ताल / Arrhythmic instigates an encounter with simulations of arrhythimic presences in an infrastructure-inflected landscape. The landscape of loops, knots, ties, ellipses, holes made of steel wires and metal bar creates a crisscross configuration suspended in space.

soDA Magazine Story

soDA magazine 19, Zurich (2002); Casebook (2014, AGYU Canada), Raqs presented the concept of “Event-shaped Hole” which translated into the essay The Event-shaped Hole and the Photographic Image in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2021 Casebook (2014, AGYU Canada) A photograph is an image of an event-shaped-hole, and as witnesses to such perforations we could […]

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 […]

When Proust Catches the Glare

As the earth turns to spin slightly faster than before in 2021, and as the heavens break ranks, involuntary memories return to the beckoning of the lime-tar-fish-jasmine-gasoline-brine smell of a new time. This smell of a new time needs new words – and an old hand – to write it all down. 

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 4, 2021 (download) A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission Single screen, Video, 18:04 minutes “Provisions for Everybody” at […]

Comic Contempt

As time refracts, its shatter illuminates differing strands. A comic’s contempt, her whisper of laughter, threatens the consensus.

Ferment

If the big, open sky is a canopy for the tumult of birds and angels, then under which roof does the flight of the ferment of our times soar? Tent cities spring from the streets and in squares like so many umbrellas of refuge and rebellion. This can be a way to re-read the history […]

Memes and Fables

Memes and Fables: …tick tock Newspaper, blackboard ink, chalk and screen print. 2021 70cm x 54.5cm Memes and Fables: …tock tick Newspaper, blackboard ink, chalk and screen print. 2021 68cm x 55.5cm Memes and Fables: …wicked Newspaper, blackboard ink, chalk and screen print. 2021 70cm x 57.5cm Memes and Fables: …let it be Newspaper, blackboard […]

Chromachron

Unexpected arrivals (of a virus in one year) and departures (of a species in another) transform the colour of time. Each year gets a colour signature: a chromachron.

The Sovereign and its Company & The Sovereign Takes a Walk

The Sovereign and its CompanyShown at: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) Velvet, silkscreen, wallpaper150 cm x 300 cm, 560 cm x 375 cm The Sovereign and its Company are multiple, and multiply formed. Anything can be deputized. The historical glory and moral authority of the sovereign and its company melts away, and then reconstitutes itself, constantly. […]

A Gathering of Birds

A Gathering of Birds Audio loop with 3 Speakers Duration: 32:41 In the sonic range of the flight-path of a gathering of birds, we momentarily transmit to each other. We surpass contours of containment, and need no translation to be contagious.

Unledgered

Unledgered Installation Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys curated by Michelle Wong  Tai Kwun Contemporary, JC Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021) The exhibition was based on Asia Art Archive’s research since 2014 into the personal archive of the late Hong Kong–based artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009) In 2016, when Raqs Media Collective first visited Ha’s studio in […]

The Course of love

The Course of Love Sculpture using faceted Lenticular panels, with Found Boat Setouchi Triennale | Honjima (2019) Setouchi Triennale | Honjima wataru funa-bito / the boatman lost the rudder. kaji-wo tae / the boat is now adrift yukue mo shiranu / not knowing where it goes. koi no michi kana / is this the course […]

Deep Breath

Sometimes, the finding of an antidote to the most basic and lethal form of amnesia, ‘the forgetting of air’, may require the undertaking of a deep dive.

Dohas for Doha

The video works Dohas for Doha are illuminated proverbs that play with linguistics, light, and the transmission of knowledge

To People, Demos & Prostheses for the History of Insurgent Crowds

To PeopleShown at: Mathaf, Doha (2019) 11 Textile and 2 Prints on paper,100 x 500 cm each Eleven hand-woven carpets and two paper prints are hung throughout the gallery, cascading to the ground. The forms that inhabit the woven textiles represent a mass, a collective, or a network of people as an interlaced, connected weave. […]

Time Devices (2011- 2024)

“One question that stayed with us and has proven to continue getting exponentially more complex is that of time. The 90s had posed the scrambling of time in ideas of development, progress, or modernity.During that time, as very young people, we examined and re-examined what progress could even mean. We have, from then, been unpacking […]

Provisions for everybody (film)

Provisions for Everybody Shown at: AV Festival, Newcastle (2018)| Project 88, Mumbai (2018)| Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) Single screen, Video, FurnitureDuration, 50′ Provisions for Everybody inscribes an eccentric itinerary on and off the trail of George Orwell that accompanies a reading of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. Traveling between Northern England, Eastern India, […]

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?”, […]

Three Shadows

In Three Shadows, the dancing figures in white have been isolated and animated to render them into ghostly spinning specters.

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, […]

Re Run

n revisiting and re-staging Cartier Bresson’s photograph in Shanghai, Raqs meet the conditions of the self-fulfilling prophecy invoked by the event captured in the original image.

Diver’s at Work

The diver, maybe she is a specter, maybe he is a submarine apparition. Diving, we are  closer to the surface of the earth than an astronaut, but the paradoxical nature of a submarine horizon makes for an experience that envelopes and recedes at the same time. We could recognize this paradox as key to an awareness of our experience of the contemporary. 

The necessity of Infinity

The Necessity of Eternity recounts what must be one of the most exciting yet neglected exchanges (Al-As’Ilah Wa’L-Ajwibah/Questions and Answers) in the intellectual history of the world.

The Blood of Stars

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.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes & Hollowgram

The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2017)Shortlisted for The Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square 3D printed PLA Plastic and cast polyester resin What, would the departure of power from a Trafalgar Square pedestal look like? The Emperor’s Old Clothes is an answer to this question in sculptural form. What we intend to place on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is […]

The Translator’s Silence

Fragments of texts by three South Asian poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Rabindranath Tagore, and Agha Shahid Ali, are presented in Urdu, Bengali and English, in lenticular 3D prints

Utsushimi

Utsushimi Site-specific installation at Suzu City, Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan (2017 – ongoing)  Double Image / Token / Emanation Materialized Architectural Drawing in Illuminated Wireframe  A double image might occur when reality exhales. In the breathing out of a form, we might see an emanation, a token of its impression in the air, on the senses. […]

The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger

he Return of Tipoo’s Tiger is a communiqué from the far future channeled by the Raqs Media Collective into the Victoria & Albert Museum for “Collecting Europe” a programme conceived by the Goethe Institute, London and the V&A Museum.

Time Gatherings

Meanwhile Elsewhere | 2014  Words, Clock-face Design on Vinyl Raqs Media Collective Berlin | Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh What begins with our eyes, travels to the brain, courses to our heart, and then returns to our eyes. Reading a feeling or a moment is something that happens between different aspects of consciousness. Reading off the walls […]

Seven Billion and One

The seven billion people of the planet are animated today as they have never been before — with possibilities, propositional forms, and with an entirely new morphology and vocabulary of solidarity. 

Asankh/ Countless

The material infinitude that makes up the real world, Raqs argues, is a swirling, entangled mass of vital, corporeal wills to live and exist actualized as forms of matter and sentience

Lost in Search of Time

While retrieving the time gained in searching for all that is lost and found one can admit to a condition that one suspects that one shares with most people in the world today, of being lost, in search of time.

Homo Speculos

Homo Speculos, is a work that reflects on this condition. It places five ‘true mirror’ assemblages on five pedestals at different heights and angles, such that a person appearing in front of it, sees himself, or herself, broken, but re-assembled, and laterally un-reversed.

Coronation Park 

Coronation Park echoes and amplifies the accidental epiphany that Raqs experienced a long time ago about the nature of power at the eponymous derelict quasi-ceremonial space where relics of the British Raj are kept for the consideration of an absent public at the outskirts of Delhi.

Bureaux of Raqs and Faqs

The Bureaux of Raqs and Faqs takes the form of an onsite performance installation. It takes off from the fact that one of the ways in which the word ‘Raqs’, in the name of the collective, has been sometimes mistakenly parsed is as the acronym RAQS, ‘Rarely Asked Questions’, as opposed to ‘FAQS’ or ‘Frequently Asked Questions

Plaques for Coronation Park

Circular plaques created as a part of Coronation Park (2015). They have inscribed statements adapted from George Orwell’s parable about the brittleness of Imperial authority, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936)

Future Plans

In the world of labour, men and women, animals and devices come together and diverge in all sorts of interesting ways.

The Ecliptic

The Ecliptic reimagines the passage of time through a bespoke clock that blends inscribed words, shifting light, and syncopated electrical impulses

A Day in the Life of Kiribati

A Day in the Life of Kiribati gives the time of Kiribati, the first land on Earth to switch the calendar over to 2000, and which could be the first place on this planet to disappear with rising sea levels because of global warming

One Meter of Truth

One Meter of Truth (Emotion)Shown at: ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery Modern of Art (2014) Steel table with wooden top, printed canvas 58”x 58”, 1m steel measure During a rehearsal process for a work being made with theatre artists, Raqs began to seek a language for states of feeling, and the body, that were at a […]

Yaksha Yakshi

Reserve Army Human-sized sand finish fibreglass sculptures, cash, and barbed wire ornaments, printed vinyl screen, 335 x 214 cm MuHKA, Antwerp (2008); The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London and New York (2008-09); Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2009) The sculptural installation The Reserve Army examines the intersection of a personal artistic practice (in this […]

Equinox

Equinox is made by Raqs in response to the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The video plays on the sense of the night coming alive with animal forms, and echoes their experience during a flashlight midnight tour of the museum where they sensed a different animatedness in the objects of the collection. 

Activo y Pasivo (Assets and Debts)

The rooms are as alike, or as apart, as  investment and insurance, two mechanisms designed to administer, anticipate and forestall, risk, speculation and the possibility of boom and bust. Does the imprint of one room on another indicate caution or audacity?

A History of Photography

A History of Photography Shown at: ‘Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) Six photographic prints2 x 2 ft. each Reading the censored letters of soldiers from the Indian sub-continent writing home in the First World War becomes a way to make a picture of the world. In this work, a selection […]

Autodidact’s Transport

The Autodidact’s Transport is a transformation of the interior of a Gwangju local metro train with literal lines of conversation (originally diagrammed from Raqs’ computer conversations with each other), scripted orations that parse Erasmus’ ‘In Praise of Folly’ to think about democracy, and with short films with aphorisms that run on the advertising monitors in the trains.

Log Book Entry Before Storm

Log Book Entry Before Storm is a site specific installation that occupies what was once a peculiar domestic space- a single house cut in two by a concrete wall to accommodate two families

Time Interruptions (2009, 2014)

Escapement 27 clocks, high glass aluminium with LED lights, four flat screen monitors, video and audio looped Dimensions variable Escapement was first imagined in the form of Location (n) at Italy Cultural Centre, Sao Paolo; Nature Morte (2006) Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does […]

Will you, Beloved Stranger

Will you, Beloved Stranger? is a performance piece for two readers in a designed setting featuring a rendition of two bodies of poetic work — those of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (writing in Hebrew) and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (writing in Arabic)

The Great Bare Mat

The Great Bare Mat gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, mat-weights (2nd century BC) China that served to weigh down carpets on which debaters would sit and argue philosophical points

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 […]

The Fruits of Labour

Raqs explores the idea of leftover, the post-mortem of industry and labour, as well as the sensory and imaginative connotations that the sentence fruits of labour may generate.

Diagram for the Last International

In 2011-12, while thinking about weaving disparate processes, interests and possibilities of all kinds together, Raqs invited Suraj Rai, a self-taught computer programmer, to create a snapshot of their working and thinking together

Eccentric Orbits

Eccentric Orbits is a suite of four videos featuring mysterious activities in a world that weighs things differently than the one we think we know.