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.

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 Time-Cone Chronogram/ film Duration: 25:05 minutes Commissioned by Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, United Kingdom (2023) The Bicyclist who fell into a Time Cone oscillates between fact and fiction while hovering over the year 1980. It was a crepuscular time. A time of thresholds and transience. The memory of a […]

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), Swamp & MarshProjection of Video Loop, Variable Dimensions and, Prints (1 x 1 m)Exhibited at Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi (2023) 12 years after The Unlikely Intimacy of Digits (2011), which animated a nineteenth century Bengali peasant’s handprint found in a London archive into a spectral count towards infinity, […]

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.

Time Travel: Board Game for Two Players

Time Travel : Board Game for Two Players Game board, scrabble squares, instructions 2022 and ongoing Time Travel was launched as a game during the Primary Forms 2, an exhibition of artists games for children of all ages under the curatorial supervision of Sebastian Cichocki and Helena Czernecka that is taking place through the school […]

Au_racle

Non-fungible, Digital object Video loop connected to fluctuating real-time global price index for gold  Non-fungible Speculations, Nature Morte, New Delhi (2022) 

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

When Proust Catches the Glare, 2021Video, Text, Scanned Handwriting. 7 minutes, 45 seconds 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 – […]

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 […]

The Ghost is Here Again

The Ghost is Here Again, 2014 Video Wallpaper The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021); The ghost is here again.To be neither witness, nor agent, not even provocateur, to be perhaps just a haunting laugh through time. To bundle sentience and turn on the electric wavelengths of interconnected metabolic surges coursing through the shared inhabitation […]

Intimate Intimidation 

Intimate Intimidation Readymade canopy, radiation hazard sign inscribed as a pattern in salt on the floor (240 x 240 cm) The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) Every willful misstep, every greedy grab, is an intimate intimidation to our own longer future. How do we stay together, in care of each other, when the fold of […]

Bestiary

Bestiary, 2021 Paper, digital drawings, photographic colour print, gold embossing 40 prints of 33 x 46 cm each The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) A New Jataka Tale:A Sumatran Rhinoceros, a Splendid Poison Frog, a Golden Bamboo Lemur loudly argue on the way to extinction. “Which form of life will persist”, they ask, […]

Tears (are not only from weeping)

Tears (are not only from weeping) Video loop, LED panel Duration: 05:59 “Laughter of Tears”, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, cry out aloud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.

Comic Contempt

Comic Contempt  Seven découpe text on leather, etching on acrylic  40 x 68 cm each The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) As time refracts, its shatter illuminates differing strands. A comic’s contempt, her whisper of laughter, threatens the consensus. The sovereign clocks itself at every chuckle that diminishes its force field. Bail conditions set […]

The Coarse Fabric of Being Human 

The Coarse Fabric of Being Human 22 hand-tufted carpets  61 × 76 cm each The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021)  The only actually shared sensation is the present continuous tense. It reconstitutes, everyday, the coarse fabric of being human, rearranging the atoms of collective experience. Fleeting epiphanies crowd, asking – like auguries – […]

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 […]

Parade

Parade Gold and silver screen print on velvet. 2021 310cm x 147.5cm Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW), Nature Morte, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021) One thing after another. Everything in and out of step. The parade sidesteps the question of where it is headed. 

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

Chromachron Paint, pantone colors of the years 2020 and 2021 The Laughter of Tears, Braunschweig, Germany (2021); Delhi Contemporary Art Week, Nature Morte, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021) 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 […]

The Sovereign and its Company & The Sovereign Takes a Walk

The Sovereign and its Company, 2021Velvet, silkscreen, 150 cm x 300 cmWallpaper 560 cm x 375 cm The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) 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 […]

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 Pandemic Circle: Trilogy of handwritten videos

“Together, this suite of poignant and poetic videos grapple with the pervasive and dispersed impact on daily routines and relationships with one another, and beyond, in the age of the Coronavirus. In the summer of 2020, Raqs Media Collective released 31Days (18 minutes, video, calligraphy, text) three months after the predicament of quarantine and seclusion caused by the Covid-19 pandemic […]

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

Deep Breath | 2019Film (25 minutes)  Pamphilos | Athens 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. The site of descent is what it’s really all about, isn’t it? Where and when to dive into the […]

Dohas for Doha

Dohas for Doha Five Videos, LED screens, variable dimensions Still More World, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art | Doha (2019) Dohas woven by Kabir, Rahim sees them in the Stars Raqs finds them everywhere, in Doha and in Mars This doha talks in shadow speech Where words fail Raqs, let commas reach When nothing […]

Time Devices (2011- 18)

Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat | 4 min 31 seconds Animated Horological Video, Words Click here to watch the video (email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access) A Day in the Life of Kiribati Clock, nameplate, tape Exhibited at Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar at National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) The Ecliptic | […]

Provisions for everybody (film)

Provisions for Everybody Single screen, Video, 50 minutes, Furniture 2018 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, Myanmar (Burma) and Catalonia, Raqs pause at Wigan Pier (in England) where Orwell queried […]

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

Three Shadows Video, loop Exhibited at The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021); Not Yet At Ease FirstSite, Colchester, United Kingdom (2018); ‘Spinal’, Fifth Street Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019) In Three Shadows, the dancing figures in white have been isolated and animated to render them into ghostly spinning specters. This is in keeping with […]

A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission

A Planet Turns on its Axis Without Permission Single screen, Video, 18:04 minutes “Provisions for Everybody” at AV Festival, Newcastle (2018), ‘Still More World’ Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) Turning, and turning around, on the Rann does not alter the white horizon. Salt– brilliant under the sun–dazzles the eyes, opens the lachrymal canals. […]

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, […]

The Assurance Clock & Toxicare 

Featured in digital posters It’s Urgent! Part II & III, Luma Westbau, Zurich 2018 The Assurance Clock The clock in the poster is an embodiment of assurance, the opposite of alarm. This is an attitude that could be seen cultivated as an antidote to the epidemic of caution and false-alarms that characterizes our time. The […]

Workers and Robots Enter A Factory Canteen

Manga style text-image assemblage. Ten screen printed panels on newsprint. Unlimited Edition 2018 Graphics by Freddy Corasco An imagined conversation between real, embodied and artificial forms of intelligence, set in a moment of respite on a working day. First published in Wonderflux – a graphic novel anthology produced by e-Flux

To Ask, When Empty

To Ask, When Empty |2018 5 Lenticular Panels, 1ft. X 2ft each Project 88 | Mumbai A suite of six uniquely colourful lenticular prints offer a dance of terse imperatives at the intersection of will and necessity: “to ask when empty, to pour when full.”

Toxicity in Equal Measure

Toxicity in Equal Measure Layered sheets with perforations on felt, leather, rubber, copper, steel, cardboard, fabric and acrylic, with gold impressions. 22 frames, 1 ft. X 1 ft. each Project 88 | Mumbai (2018) A singular array of surfaces in materials that range from leather to metal celebrate the essential instability of all substances. Nothing […]

Re Run

Re-Run | 2013 Video loop ‘Extra Time’ at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai (2013) |  ‘Untimely Calendar’ at NGMA, New Delhi (2014) | ‘Raqs Media Collective’ at K21, Dusseldorf (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson took a photograph of a bank run in Shanghai in December 1948: A crowd of people desperate to get their money out of a bank in […]

The necessity of Infinity

The necessity of Infinity | 2017 Reading performance, Carpet, gold embroidery, Performers, musical tone generators; Carpet Dimensions 4 x 4.8m | Exhibited at Sharjah Biennale 2017, Sharjah “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. In […]

The Blood of Stars

The Blood of Stars Single screen, Video, 13 minutes  Extracts from a Future History | Lulea  (2017); The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) 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 […]

Alive, with Cerussite and Peppered Moth

Alive, with Cerussite and Peppered Moth 3D printed PLA plastic, cast polyester resin, plywood and video projections  Architectural Collaborators: Palak Jhunjhunwala and Stratis Georgiu Exhibition History: Whitworth, Manchester (2017) Mathaf, Doha (2018) Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020) This architectural installation speaks to the evolution of materials and living forms across alternative time epochs. The 3D printed structure represents crystal […]

The Emperor’s Old Clothes & Hollowgram

The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2017) Shortlisted for 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

The Translator’s Silence Three lenticular panels, 22 inches x 36.6 inches each Lines of Control: the Partition as Productive Space, Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2012)

Utsushimi

Utsushimi (2017 – ongoing)  Double Image / Token / Emanation Materialized Architectural Drawing in Illuminated Wireframe  Site specific installation at Suzu City, Oku-Noto Triennale, Japan

Undoing walls

Undoing Walls| 2017 1’ 55” Animation loop, Variable Dimensions Can a “dysfunctional” wall structure be imagined so as to question the original intentions of a Government? Can a “welcoming” and useful wall be created; one that serves the communities that it is meant to separate and which proposes an alternative solution to human segregation, when […]

Communard Biscuits

Communard Biscuits (2017) 3 D Printing, Silicone mould, flour, water, salt500 biscuits, 9 x 1 x 1 cm (each) Exhibited at Whitworth, Manchester A hard tack biscuit from the Paris Commune of 1871 was 3D scanned, 3D printed, a mould made and facsimile biscuits baked. History in facsimile, waiting for a bite.  Made in collaboration with the People’s […]

The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger

The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger | 2017 Performance, 2 video projections, masks, paper plaques V&A Museum | London Imagine an Eighteenth century South Indian automaton of a devouring tiger commissioned by Tipoo Sultan becoming a holy relic in the Europe of 4016 CE – a fetish object worshipped by the future submarine inhabitants of the […]

Dyeing Inayat Khan 

Dyeing Inayat Khan (2016) 2- channel video installation, color and sound New Sensorium, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2016) | Nature Morte, Bikaner House, Delhi (2021) Animation and editing: Ikroop Sandhu and Rajan Singh Click here to watch the full video (email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)

Perhaps

Site specific Installation Lincoln Brayford Pool, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK (2016) Perhaps (An Investigation Outside The Laws of Thought) The arcs in the sculpture are portals. And as portals, they recall George Boole’s (who was a lincoln person) ‘logic gates’ ‐ conceptual sites of entry and exit for answers to questions that can end […]

Night & Day, Day & Night

Night & Day, Day & Night 24-hour clock, words, 5 feet diameter Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014) In twenty four words about duration in Hindi, breath gives way to blink, the origin anticipates the end, revolutions and eclipses consider each other. It happens all the time.

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

Seven Billion and One | 2015  Variations of the infinity sign in gold pigment, on pages of newspapers coated with black ink (English, Hindi, Urdu), 108 sheets of 22 x 14.5 inches SMFA (School of the Museum of Fine Arts) | Boston

Asankh/ Countless

Asankh/ Countless | 2014 Digital Print on ACP, acrylic (6 x 4 ft.) | Untimely Calendar, solo show at NGMA (2014) 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. Infinity has room […]

Homo Speculos

Homo Speculos 5 true mirrors in matt-black columns (38 x 38 x 168 cm, 38 x 38 x 162 cm, 38 x 38 x 138 cm, 38 x 38 x 128 cm, 38 x 38 x 118 cm) Adam Aronson Gallery, Laumier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Missouri (2015) Five true mirrors show you as you […]

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

Bureaux of Raqs and Faqs Found furniture, index cards, words, plaques, electronic word displays, text and a scenario Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2015)

Fever, Fever

Fever, Fever | 2015 Digital video, photo-constellations, match boxes, archival prints, 6’29’’ min (played in loop) Global Imaginations | Museum De Lakenhal | Leiden, The Netherlands

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

Drawing animation Duration: 3 minutes Untimely Calendar/Asamayavali, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) In the world of labour, men and women, animals and devices come together and diverge in all sorts of interesting ways. The coupling and uncoupling of gears and wings, of claws and hands, of hooves and feet, of algorithms […]

The Museum of Lost Constellations

Thirteen Lost Constellations Grus, The Flamingo, or The Crane Cerberus, the Three-Headed Dog Custodian of the Harvest Ramus Pomifer, The Apple Branch Lilium, The Lilies Officina Typographica, The Printing Office Quadrans Muralis, The Mural Quadrant The River Tigris Rangifer, The Reindeer Testudo, The Turtle Telescopium Herschelii, Herschel’s Telescope Scarabeus, The Scarab Beetle Exhibited at “Art […]

One Meter of Truth

One Meter of Truth (Emotion) Steel table with wooden top, printed canvas (58”x 58”, 1m steel measure) ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, NGMA (2014) 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 tangent to the way in […]

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 Cutouts, animation, video loop Part of ‘The Great Bare Mat & Constellation’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2013) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) A carnival: an autumnal solstice celebration of all that is animate and alive. Horses lose their heads, fish leave their shadows, Diana, the goddess of the hunt is in […]

Carbon Twilight & Sleepwalker’s Caravan

Carbon Twilight Video loop Duration: 3:13 minutes National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) The gatekeepers of the treasury have left the gates of the bank to stand guard over the twilight. A consignment of carbon moves between undisclosed stations under their watch. Sometimes, the shortest distance between the coalmine and the bank […]

The Last International & Three Meetings That May Have Happened, Underwater or Mid-Air

The Last International Installation with banners, screens, and trees, projections, symposium, reading performance and multiple performer actions Performed and Exhibited at Performa Festival, New York (2013) Collaboration in scenography, choreography and performance with Zuleikha Chaudhuri Performers: Umang Bhattacharya, Gagandeep Singh, Himali Singh Soin, along with Raqs, and eight symposium participants from New York city. Video […]

Activo y Pasivo (Assets and Debts)

Activo y Pasivo (Assets and Debts) Room Installation Size: 10 x 10 x 7 ft. Medium: Wood and glass room, wallpaper, tubelights, carpet Exhibited at ‘It’s Possible Because It’s Possible’, CA2M, Madrid (2014), Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) The missing fourth wall of a room saves it from claustrophobia. The walls, and slightly low ceiling, […]

A History of Photography

Six photographic prints 2 x 2 ft. each Exhibited at Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) 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 of their letters also become a way […]

Corrections to the First Draft of History

Corrections to the First Draft of History Newsprint, chalkboard paint and chalk Dimensions variable Exhibited in an eponymous solo exhibition, at Frith Street Gallery, London (2014) followed by Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) In 1850, a man called Peary Churn Sarkar wrote up a primer for Bengalis to learn English with. He called it, ‘The First Book of […]

A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia

A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper 305 x 61 inches Exhibited in Clark House initiated ‘Artists Against AFSPA’ at NGMA, Mumbai (2011), ‘Waiting for the Wind’, Experimenter, Kolkata (2014) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014)

Autodidact’s Transport

Autodidact’s Transport Train carriage interior refurnishing, specially woven fabric, vinyl, short films, orations Public Art Project, Gwangju Folly, Gwangju Metro System, South Korea 2014 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’ […]

Log Book Entry Before Storm

Log Book Entry Before Storm Site specific transformation In ‘Whorled Explorations’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi 2014 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. The work re-introduces circulation into this still […]

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

Performance, Architecture, Textual Collation, 2013 Architectural collaborators: Efrat-Kowalsky Architects Video of performance: 43 minutes Video tech – Yoav Bezaleli & Oscar Abush Readers: Amit Gour and Ruba Amira Salameh Exhibited at ‘Host & Guest’ curated by Steven Henry Madoff at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2013) will you, beloved stranger, ever witness […]

The Dislocation of Degree Zero

Video loop Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2013) In the present world, ever since the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, the system of longitudes beginning and ending at an arbitrarily decided degree zero located at the Greenwich Observatory near London creates a notional global central axis and degrees of peripherality. This convention is […]

The Great Bare Mat

The Great Bare Mat Series encapsulates Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012-2013) The piece was designed as a carpet for the staging of conversations, and installed at the feet of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-fold 17th-century Japanese screen from the Gardner Museum’s collection. “The Great Bare Mat” gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, […]

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 House Of Everything And Nothing

Text, Illumination and Surface Modification of an Abandoned House 24 Jor Bagh, Delhi (2013) The House of Everything and Nothing is an exploration of the infinity of worlds that Raqs Media Collective inhabit. In 2013, Raqs asked a software programmer to come up with an algorithm that could help render the pattern generated data harvested […]

The Fruits of Labour

Fruits of Labour (2012) 100 orange fruit trees, industrial sizes fans, framed copies of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar | Public Art Project at REAKT: Olhares e Processos, Guimaraes Approaching the sense of exhaustion and hopelessness of the end of a factory’s life cycle, the artists established a link between a call published in a newspaper […]

Diagram for the Last International

Diagram for the Last International Video Loop Performa Festival, New York (2013); National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014) 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. Suraj plotted the […]

Eccentric Orbits

Eccentric Orbits Four looped videos featuring pixels and the cosmos (1’07”, 1’ 15”,1’ 18”,1’ 31”) A Different Gravity Art Fair, Delhi How different would things be if they were subject to another gravity? Eccentric Orbits is a suite of four videos featuring mysterious activities in a world that weighs things differently than the one we think […]

A Different Gravity

A Different Gravity Furniture, Words, Mirror, Illumination, Carpet, Print India Art Fair, Project 88 (2012) A Different Gravity presents a flying carpet, a timetable, a wrong chair, and a mirror stage of some sort. You can play with all of these like you would in a scrabble game, and in the mix can have flying […]

Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms

Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms Laser cut aluminium foil, 12 plexiglass sheets, 257 x 492 cm Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012) Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms was comprised of 12 acrylic sheets and etched aluminum figures taken mainly from the Museum’s tapestries. The sheets were installed several inches away from the wall so that the […]

Primary Education of the Autodidact

Primary Education of the Autodidact Vinyl transfer on building windows Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2012) The Primary Education of the Autodidact, commissioned by the Audain Gallery, is out of a series of works by Raqs Media Collective that explores knowledge, power, utterance, and silence. It directly addresses the notion and problematic of the autodidact, and also […]

Time Symposium

Time Symposium Ephemeral event with Time, table settings, Wine, Index Cards, Curated Texts, Conversation Wide Open School, Hayward, London (2012) A quorum of players face off across a long well lit table over an abundant flow of wine in a play of words and thought. Around them is a theater full of listeners, witnesses to […]

phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (TWO LOVE STORIES)

phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (Two Love Stories) Single channel projected digital slide show, gilded frame, 90 x 120 cm Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi (2012) A sailor, a prostitute, a city, the search for warmth, and a slice of snatched time; Shore Leave is a short story in words and images about words and the unsaid, about desire […]

The Robin Hood of Wisdom

The Robin Hood of Wisdom Printed Cards, Guerrilla Actions Copenhagen Art Festival, Denmark (2012) What does knowledge taste like? The unsalted white of an egg. It asks for the garnish of betrayal. An instruction based work for public libraries which pauses to consider the saline taste of wisdom. “We thought of the community of readership, which […]

It’s About Being Here and There at the Same Time

Installation Drawing on wall made of 3mm copper, brass and steel metal strips. 105 inches x 67 inches Part of ‘A Different Gravity’, solo booth, Project 88, India Art Fair (2012).; “Untimely calendar”, National Gallery of Modern Art | New Delhi (2014) Three metallic strips – brass, copper and steel– make a possible ‘doorway’ to […]