Betaal Tareef: In Praise of Off-time (and its Entities)
A configuration of five graphic ‘imprints’ and three augmented-reality ‘interferences spread across various levels of The Cosmic House, London.
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.
.MOV.ESSAYS | .MP4.PLUS | DEVICES | GATHERINGS | INTERFERENCES | INTERRUPTIONS | LEXICA | LOOPS | UNLEDGERED
A configuration of five graphic ‘imprints’ and three augmented-reality ‘interferences spread across various levels of The Cosmic House, London.
Autoluminous is an index of our awareness of the inscription of energy into every waking, sleeping and dreaming moment.
All, Humans is a permanent commission at School of Linguistics and Cultural Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt.
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.
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 is not a typical board game, although it looks quite ordinary: it consists of a board, instructions, and alphabet squares.
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 […]
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 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. […]
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 | […]
An imagined conversation between real, embodied and artificial forms of intelligence, set in a moment of respite on a working day.
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.
A hard tack biscuit from the Paris Commune of 1871 was 3D scanned, 3D printed, a mould made and facsimile biscuits baked.
A 24 hour clock where the usual digits are displaced with words in the Devanagri script relating to varying scales of time.
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.
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?
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.
Three metallic strips – brass, copper and steel– make a possible ‘doorway’ to another place, another time, and configure a possibility of being simultaneously inside and outside
Three unwritten books, each marking a whimsical relationship to specific influential texts (by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Illyich Lenin and Antonio Gramsci) in the canon of Marxism, find their place amongst a set of echoing titles in a carefully laid out miniature library
Euphoria Machine is the name we give to the apparatus of desire and cognition that seeks to create a consensus within society for boundless energy and wealth, and effaces all doubts and dissent about the ways in which this energy and wealth must be acquired.
Revoltage Shown at: Project 88, Mumbai (2010) | Reading Light’, Festival d’Automne, Espace Oscar Niemeyer, Paris (2011) | Art Unlimited Basel (2012) | Tel Aviv Museum (2012) | Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst, Unna (2014) | NGMA, New Delhi (2014) Text, lightbulbs, fixtures, acrylic, wire, synchroniser Revoltage fills the space it occupies with warmth, light, and […]
We the Fuel | 2011 9 framed photographs, tape residue (210 x 180 cm) A collage made with treated film posters and dental X-rays Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011); Helsinki Photography Biennale, Finland (2014)
36 Planes of Emotions extends the palette of emotions to include states of collective potential.
To survive on love and fresh air is to thrive on next to nothing. Accordingly, this image bottles the two things that are precious but impossible to sell—love and fresh air.
Three volunteers tell three stories. The surface underneath them is in a state of permanent revolution.
The Communist Latento is an image/text series that features photographs of found minimalist hand-drawn signage on transparent surfaces (mainly arrows and direction markers) annotated by a set of terse statements by Raqs.
Seven frames stand in for the seven days of the week. Each frame contains an assemblage of suspended objects.
The clock’s hands measure the stations of the hours, while human hands play their own game of silhouettes, closing in on the hour of fear only to then open out on the moment of ecstasy, as if protecting Time from its own devices.
The installation uses found poetry and accidental discoveries in archives and takes the form of a playful gesture of appreciation of the labour of the archivist.
One Four Four Zero Acrylic glass tubes in circular acrylic housing, 15 x 64 cm diameter Escapement, Frith Street Gallery, London (2009) One thousand four hundred and forty crystal perspex tubes, some square, some circular, some hexagonal, sit tightly packed in what looks like an transparent empty clock set on a plinth. Each handcrafted perspex […]
used transparencies of mechanical drawing encased in plexiglass sheets, the clouded light of dawn and the rudimentary text of the screenplay of an imaginary film sequence to speak of the quotidian battle between love and time, fought over the delicate terms of the silent departure of a man from his lover’s bed.
Every factory has a time book. The time book is an index of the value of a worker’s time. It records hours, minutes and money, and acts as the memory machine of a factory.
Insurance%Investment illustrates the mental arithmetic of investment and insurance, two mechanisms designed to administer, anticipate and forestall risk, speculation and the possibility of failure.
Sightings is a photographic experiment with decaying architecture that suggests cartographic resonances. While, Four Figures works out four ways of making sense of today’s world, mapping a frontier between precarity and possibility.
Just Passed Harmony Inkjet on galvanized aluminum. 18 x 182 cm Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) A long strip of galvanized steel bears the emboss of the high road, just past the town called harmony. On the way, possibly to Industry.
The Mathematics Of Anacoustic Reason Inkjet print, 182 x 120 cm Print containing images, text and mathematical symbols arranged in the form of an equation. “Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality” (a project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist), NOW WHAT: Democracy and Contemporary Art, Space Hamilton and Insa Art Space, Seoul (2006) The Mathematics […]
With respect to residue is a project deigned to provoke reflection about the things, states of being, and histories that end up abandoned and waste, as the detritus of the routine processes that constitute and maintain the world.
The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1 is an installation that embodies an epistolary enigma. The basis of this work are a set of eighteen ‘letters’ between Raqs and a person or entity who is identified as K.D. Vyas, sometime redactor of the Mahabharata.
A piece in response to the invitation from Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija on the occasion of Utopia Station at Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University
2005/ 2 lightboxes, galvanized wire, printed broadsheets, 66 x 76 x 13 cm | Exhibited at Ephemeral cities: A Project Space, Deptford X, London (2005)
The Network of No_Des HTML 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art (2004) “Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as ‘no-des’ gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to the old words – ‘des’, and ‘par-des’. ‘Des‘ (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; ‘pardes’ suggests exile, and an alien […]
OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) Software | 2022 OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) was an online space for people, machines, and codes to play and work together – to share, create and transform images, sounds, videos and texts. Opus was an attempt to create a digital commons in culture, based on the principle of […]
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Made with Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Print.com, Delhi (2000); Kingdom of Piracy (2002); ISEA (2004)