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
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.
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, […]
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 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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
To People (2019) 11 Textile and 2 Prints on paper, 100 x 500 cm each Still More World | Mathaf | Doha 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 […]
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?”, […]
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 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 […]
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 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 […]
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 | 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
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)
Art in the Age of Collective Intelligence | 2015 40 photo prints on Moab metallic silver paper, giclee, 24 inches x 24 inches each Adam Aronson Gallery, Laumier Sculpture Park, St. Louis | Missouri If the World is a Fair Place Then.. | 2015 Laser cut steel bands, words | Exhibited at Laumier Sculpture Park, […]
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 […]
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) 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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 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 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 […]
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 […]
In Rewriting On the Wall, hand-prints are reconfigured to produce an alphabet of gestures—each a gloss of the letters in standard American Sign Language as used by deaf and mute people. The letters add up to a text (which accompanies the work): a stammering, hesitant, syntactically unsure consideration (written by a hand that appears on the wall like the hand that wrote on the wall in the episode of Belshazzar’s feast in the Old Testament) of the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘We’ and the horizon that encompasses singular and plural modes of being.
More Salt In Your Tears Site-specific installation in the Baltic Sea with stainless steel, steel cable, wood, concrete anchors Contemporary Art Archipelago, Turku, Finland (2011) More Salt In Your Tears is a text sculpture composed of three dimensional stainless steel letter-forms anchored on to a shallow section of seabed of the Baltic Sea near Turku, Finland. […]
Can You Say that Again (5 Uneasy Pieces) Temporary public sculpture with 5 audio tracks (4:36, 4:43, 6:03, 4:59, 5:19); 5 sets of paired life-size sculptures with seating extensions, five recorded dialogues, speakers, sensors Anyang Public Art Project, Anyang, Korea (2010) Can You Say That Again? (5 Uneasy Pieces) features an intimate portable outdoor audio theater, […]
The Things that Happen when Falling in Love Installation with 18 coloured and clear acrylic figures with printed mirrored letters, wire cables, 7 video screens, 13 photographs Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) The Things That Happen When Falling in Love brings together suggestions of words, and people on the move to create an […]
When the Scales Fall from your Eyes Installation with mould-blown glass busts, found objects, variable-colour light source IKON Gallery, Birmingham (2009) “When the Scales Fall from Your Eyes” dismantles our obsessions with measurement and quantifiable evaluation by gathering scales that set out to weigh impossibilities. An array of glass cast busts are mounted with heads made […]
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 […]
Unusually Adrift from the Shoreline Site-specific Installation Neighbourhood Secrets Project/Stavanger (2008); Rådhusteateret, Sandnes, Norway (2008) A cinema invites us to see in the dark. A lighthouse helps a sailor see where he is. Both work with beams of light. Both cause observers to question their own coordinates. Visitors to the old cinema of Sandnes stumble […]
Unfamiliar Tales Lenticular photographs, Etched acrylic sheets, 2 sets of 2, each 90 x 120 cm Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria (2008-09) “Unfamiliar Tales” is a pair of image-text diptychs titled ‘How The Most Terrible Solitude Was Overcome’ and ‘How the Long Wait for the Thaw was Endured’. The work features lenticular reproduction of photographic […]
However Incongruous | 2011 Fibreglass (160 x 92 x 320 cm) | Print Albrecht Dürer came across rumors of the Indian rhinoceros named Gainda sometime in 1515 that he would immortalize in his woodcut, Rhinoceros. Gainda the rhinoceros, far from his native habitat in the grasslands of Gujarat (where no rhinoceroses remains today), was sadly lost at […]
The Wherehouse Installation with video, found objects, altered books, text panels, audio, spoken performance, photographs, and web page Revolution/Restoration II, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2004); Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2004–05) The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment. It constitutes an assemblage of […]
Raqs Media Collective with Atelier BowWow (Tokyo) Portable, multi-use structure made with packing crates for computers, projectors, paper, sound and people. Exhibited at How Latitudes Become Forms, Walker Art Center Minneapolis (2003) Commissioned by the Walker Art Center and funded by the Foundation, Temporary Autonomous Sarai is an installation and interdisciplinary collaboration between RAQS Media Collective (New […]
