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.

The Robin Hood of Wisdom

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.

Forthcoming titles

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

Reverse Engineering the Euphoria Machine

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

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 […]

Rewriting on the wall

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 the deaf community.

More Salt In Your Tears

More Salt In Your Tears first presented as 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.

We the Fuel

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)

Proverbs

Proverbs is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships

Strikes At Time

‘Strikes at Time’ is a lucid dream. It takes readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night to take back the night.

The Communist Latento

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.

Time is Money

Speculating on the concept of time, Time is Money intertwines financial and political matters related to capitalism with ontological issues related to ephemerality and permanence

Surface Tension Studies

Surface Tension Studies is a suite of photographs which considers making choices between unfathomable depth and a distant horizon, encountering the strong pull of submerged currents, the attractions of beaching on unnamed islands, and the modest comfort of anchorage

The Knots that Bind are the Knots that Fray

In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne.Raqs treats found footage of the last voyage of the ship-building cranes down the Tyne river (shot by an engineer and amateur shipyard enthusiast) to create a world of passages, transitions and departures.

Over Time

Seven frames stand in for the seven days of the week. Each frame contains an assemblage of suspended objects.

Can You Say that Again (5 Uneasy Pieces)

Can You Say That Again? (5 Uneasy Pieces) features an intimate portable outdoor audio theater, framed by the “Exit” glyph of the walking man and the narration of five episodes of anchorage and dislocation. Part public furniture, part listening station.

The Capital of Accumulation

The Capital of Accumulation is a video installation that writes an oblique narrative of the relationship between metropolises and the world in counterpoint to Rosa Luxemburg’s exceptional critique of global political economy, ‘The Accumulation of Capital’.

Brazen (Pittsburgh Torpedo)

Brazen (2009) was displayed at The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London and New York.
In the grounds of an abandoned steel furnace, in a city that once made the greatest amount of steel in the world

The surface of each day is a different planet

The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet | 2009Film (38 minutes)Art Now: Lightbox | Tate Britain Stories leak, histories collide. Bones, bodies, faces, and handwriting blur. Crowds gather and move. Open-ended and anti-documentary, The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet builds sequential scenarios that move across time and space, while considering collectivity, anonymity […]

On the Other Hand

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. 

Decomposition

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

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.

Love is Engineering

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.

Reserve Army

The sculptural installation The Reserve Army examines the intersection of a personal artistic practice (in this case, that of the early 20th Century Indian sculptor Ram Kinkar Baij) with the construction of icons to represent the newly independent nation-state, as well as the rather clumsy union of Modernism and a traditional, folkloric Indian culture.

Unusually Adrift from the Shoreline

Unusually Adrift From the Shoreline is a work about darkness, light, navigation and memory. Centred on a cinema lost to time, it is intended to prompt unfamiliar thoughts in the city. Thoughts and feelings about the pleasures and the hidden perils of losing oneself: in movies, at sea, and in the oceanic expanse of time.

Unfamiliar Tales

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’

Anonymous Steel Worker

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.

DisOrient

A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of Europe, pointing away, below a band of flat colors, an array of would-be flags

INSURANCE % INVESTMENT

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 & Four Figures

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.

The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason

The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason is an aphoristic image-text work in response to an invitation to respond to the concept: Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality. The project responds to this invitation by expressing an equation written primarily in the formal language of mathematics and by elaborating on this expression with images and a brief accompanying text.

With Respect to Residue

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 K.D.Vyas Correspondence

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.

 Erosion by Whispers

Erosion by Whispers is an intangible presence of words, whispers and rumours across our dense urban infrastructure suggesting that fragility is as much part of the experience of cities as the claim to endurance is built into their design.

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason

A Measure of Anacoustic Reason | 2005Installation with 1 projection, 4 screens, 4 dialogues, 4 lecterns, 4 benches with embedded speakers, lightbox | Exhibited at India Contemporary, Venice Biennale (2005), Thermocline of Art, Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2007), There has been a change of plan, Nature Morte, New Delhi (2006)  A Measure of […]

The Wherehouse

The Wherehouse is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment

The Network of No_Des

Network of No_des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, re-mixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities.

A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)

In this installation transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked Upanishadic dialogue, and video recordings of a spoken English class in Delhi

TAS (Temporary Autonomous Sarai)

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 Delhi) and the architectural firm Atelier Bow Wow (Tokyo

n°28 

Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check posts, evictions, phone booths, bus stations, cyclists and communication infrastructure are positioned in counterpoint to legal excerpts and administrative notes

OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification)

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 […]

Coordinates Of Everyday Life

In listing a set of latitude and longitude measurements, bracketed by two calendar years, this installation names a citycalled Delhi and a time that feels like the first two years of the twenty-first century

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE WORK OF ART

he series of possibilities in the words that constitute the statement Please Do Not Touch the Work of Art are prised open by rearranging them to form statements of an almost identical length, that bear very different attitudes