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
Forthcoming Titles Books, jacket cover designs, frames (set of 10) Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi (2012) 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 […]
Reverse Engineering the Euphoria Machine Installation with furniture, 2 videos, objects, drawings, photographs Mori Museum, Tokyo (2008-09); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2009); Essl Museum, Vienna (2009); Gallery Nature Morte, Berlin (2012) Euphoria Machine is the name we give to the apparatus of desire and cognition that seeks to create a consensus within society for […]
Revoltage Text, lightbulbs, fixtures, acrylic, wire, synchroniser Exhibition History: ‘The Capital of Accumulation’, Project 88, Mumbai (2010); ‘Reading Light’, Festival d’Automne, Espace Oscar Niemeyer, Paris (2011); Art Unlimited Basel (2012); ‘Critical Mass’, Tel Aviv Museum (2012); ‘Words Don’t Come Easily’, Zentrum für Internationale Lichtkunst, Unna (2014). Revoltage fills the space it occupies with warmth, light, […]
Time Capsule from 2011 (TO BE OPENED IN 2061) Aluminum box with contents (39 x 29 x 32 cm) 6th Momentum Biennial, Moss, Norway (2011)
How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon | Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011) Seven photographic prints trace the journey of an illuminated vehicle across a liminal landscape. Neon letters, gesturing towards a terse but optimistic instruction, annotate each […]
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. […]
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 Cured MDF, LED lights, wooden frame, lighting sequencer Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011). Lado A Lado (India – Side by Side), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2012). “Proverbs” is a series of textual sculptures that express a set of ambiguities about transactions and relationships. Money, Power, Time, Emotion, Regret, Laughter, Memory are the […]
The Untold Intimacy of Digits Looped video projection (00:47 minutes) Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2011); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011); Museum fur Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt (2012); NGMA, Delhi (2014); K21, Düsseldorf (2018) In every sum figured by power, a remainder haunts the calculation. Not everything adds up. A people are never […]
Marks | 2011 Acrylic, MDF, red LEDs, electrical wires, gold mylar sheet Headquarters of French Communist Party, 2, Place du Colonel Fabien, Paris (2011); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayos (CA2M), Madrid (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico (2015); Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires (2015); K21, Dusseldorf, Germany (2018):
An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale looped video projection (3:30 minutes) Exhibited at Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011); The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2012)
36 Planes of Emotions Laser engraved acrylic glass, furniture, lighting (180 x 150 x 60 cm) Surjection, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2011); Raqs Media Collective, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2012) Graphic design: Amitabh Kumar + Satyabrata Rai. 36 Planes of Emotions extends the palette of emotions to include states of collective potential. These are embodied in […]
Strikes at Time 2 synchronized video projections with sound, 18’ 32” Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2011) Strikes at Time is a lucid dream, readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night. In that no man’s land annexed by the awakening mind from the fatigue […]
Vertical Video Loop | 2011 “Asamayavali/ Untimely Calendar”, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) Prevailing economic theories, no matter how rational they pretend to be, attribute a quasi-mystical power to the force that is imagined as governing the continuing fluctuations of production and exchange. Often this force is named an ‘invisible hand’. […]
The Librarian’s Lucid Dream Wallpaper Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Books have lost their titles, and the titles have gone astray, create dalliances with each others’ words. The Librarian’s Lucid Dream is a wallpaper carnival of impossible books made up of the index card entries for an imaginary library. In each instance, the uncanny, nagging sensation that says […]
Impossibly Rare, Infinitely Valuable, Eternally Free Photograph. 21 x 15 cm Hard to Sell, Good to Have, Palais Sturany, Vienna (2010) 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.
The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon Black and white lambda prints, Series of 5, each 76 x 76 cm Project 88, Mumbai (2010); NGMA, Delhi (2014) The Perpetual Recall of the Penultimate Afternoon constructs an itinerary in the footsteps of Rosa Luxemberg’s last days in Berlin, with a detour into the yard of the former Rosa […]
Revolutionary Forces (The Three Tasters) Performative installation with rotating platforms, 2 video monitors, 3 actors West Heavens, Shanghai (2010) Three volunteers tell three stories. The surface underneath them is in a state of permanent revolution. As the ground turns, as they turn inside out, one speaks about the shattering of illusions. Another about the balance […]
Fragments from a Communist Latento Photographs in lightboxes, Series of 8, each 71 x 51 x 13 cm Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2010); Shanghai Biennale (2010) 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 […]
Rules to be Invented Acrylic. 60 x 60 x 60 cm Project 88, Mumbai (2010) A chessboard that scales peaks. The pieces climb up and down a terrain as uneven as history. All chess pieces save the knight have been eliminated. Because there is no king left to checkmate, no queen to trap, or pawn […]
Time is Money Prints, Series of 5, each 12 x 28 cm Impossible Exchange, Frieze Fair (2010); Time Currency, Liverpool Biennial (2010) 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. “The idea of deploying time in terms of […]
Surface Tension Studies Giclée prints on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 13, each 25 x 40 cm Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010) 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 […]
The Knots that Bind are the Knots that Fray 7 channel video installation, varying lengths Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle (2010); Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Noida, U.P (2012) In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were […]
phantoroman: SKIRMISH Laser-cut acrylic over inkjet on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta paper, Series of 8, each 40 x 60 cm Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2010) Skirmish is a brief, unhappy, love story with pictures and text, another of Raqs’ ongoing forays into the photo-roman form. Skirmish tells the story of an imagined estranged couple fighting a coded war of […]
Over Time Assembled and framed found objects, Series of 7, each 48 x 38 x 8 cm Project 88, Mumbai (2010) Seven frames stand in for the seven days of the week. Each frame contains an assemblage of suspended objects. Sharpeners, erasers, notebooks, dividers, rulers, pencils, diaries, are caught between sheets of perspex like insects in amber. […]
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, […]
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World Digital print on Hahnemühle FineArt pape, 89 x 41 cm Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks. Each block, repeated across the map, stands in for some superlative claim or the other on the planet and its resources. Perhaps this is a completed puzzle waiting […]
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 […]
Capital of Accumulation 2010/ Installation with 2 channel video projection and audio, 2 books in glass-fronted bookcase. Duration: 50:00 minutes The promised city, Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin (2010); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2010); The Capital of Accumulation, Project 88, Mumbai (2010), Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium (2012) The Capital of Accumulation is a video installation […]
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, there stands an emptied out torpedo car that once transported hot molten pig iron to a steel factory across a river on rail tracks.
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 Wall-mounted LED, acrylic lightbox, 71 x 10 x 4 cm Frith Street Gallery, London (2009) 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 […]
Decomposition Site-specific installation at the Asia Art Archive with index cards, self-inking stamps, printed ceramic tiles, customized jigsaw puzzles Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2009) 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 […]
Love is Engineering Printed transparencies, acrylic glass, steel fixtures, 24 x 36 cm Signs Taken for Wonders: Recent Art from India and Pakistan, Aicon Gallery, London (2009) Fused 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 […]
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 […]
Anonymous Steel Worker | 2007Enamel screen print on stainless steel, 96 inches x 58.5 inchesMattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) 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. But time also […]
DisOrient Print on bond paper, 30 x 21 cm Part of Markus Meissen’s The Violence of Participation, 2007 Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2007); Markus Meissen, The Violence of Participation (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2007) A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of […]
Insurance%Investment Three videos with sound tracks, wallpaper with photographic prints, 2007 Art of the Possible, Lunds Konsthall, Lund (2007) 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. Whirling motorcyclists in a fairground ‘well of death’, giant rotating fan blades, […]
Ceasural Variations I & II 2 Videos: Ceasural 1: 03:18; Ceasural 2: 3:53 Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08). Re:Frame, Lowave, Paris (2009) Two short video meditations set in the post-industrial landscape of the steel town of Pittsburgh. Memory, the permanence of steel, the impermanence of industry and an invocation of the silent aftermath of decades of […]
Sightings/ 2007 Altered photographs printed on vinyl. Series of 4, each 130 x 275 cm San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco (2007); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007). Sightings is a photographic experiment with decaying architecture that suggests cartographic resonances. The images, taken together, seem to indicate the possibility of an entire map of the world that can […]
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.
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 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 […]
Sets of 4 Printed (Paper) Table Mats with gold pigment with maps and images | Installation with lightbox table, chair, ashtray, printed paper placemats Note: The work was first shown at the Liverpool Biennale, 2004 as Table Maps and then at 2nd Guangzhou Triennal, Guangzhou, China, 18 November 2005 – 15 January 2006 as an installation […]
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.
Contribution For “2006 Peace Tower” Vinyl Panel, 2 feet x 2 feet A piece in response to the invitation from Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija to contribute to the ‘Peace Tower’ for the Whitney Biennial 2006. The 2006 Peace Tower, echoes the ‘Artists Tower for Peace and Against the War in Vietnam’ designed by […]
There Has Been A Change Of Plan 2006/ Photographs on Hahnemuhle FInArt paper. Series of 4, each 96 x 137 cm There has been a change of plan, Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi (2006) There has been a change of plan features enigmatic images of aircraft abandoned in a dessert blossoming after a rain shower. […]
A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him Installation with rebar, furniture, closed circuit video Sub-contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006). Bombaysers de Lille, Maison Folie Moulins, Lille (2006-07) “A dying man sings of that which felled him” presents its viewer with a silent song of a thousand words, a bier of iron […]
On the question of standards while considering the freedom of speech, after Duchamp Printed postcard 10 x 15 cm Utopia Station, Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (2006) 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 […]
3 Caveats On A Barewall | 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually Installation of bilingual wall texts and wrist band inscriptions Sub-contingent, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006) “3 Caveats…” are a set of inscriptions designed to be read on a bare wall, or worn as wristbands, that ask questions about viewership, curation, exhibition and […]
2005/ HTML The word “ectropy” means a general increase in organisation. It appears to have been developed in 196 by Willard V. Quine, a philosopher and mathematician, in the course of a series of discussions about information. It is now understood as an antonym of “entropy”. If entropy is the net increase in the tendency […]
2005/ 2 lightboxes, galvanized wire, printed broadsheets, 66 x 76 x 13 cm | Exhibited at Ephemeral cities: A Project Space, Deptford X, London (2005)
2005/ Installation with shoes, astroturf, and video projections | Exhibited at Citizens, Pitzhanger Manor House, London (2005); The City Gallery, Leicester (2005); Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales (2005); Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; (2005). Lost New Shoes confronts the notion of the ‘citizen’ by looking at the absence or void where a person may be. One way of […]
Preface to a Ghost Story, 2005, is a series of black-and-white vignettes that tell the tale of an ‘unknown citizen’ who has leaped to his death, leaving behind a make-do archive for a gathering of shadows.
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 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 […]
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 […]
2003/ Posters installed in situ in Venice, Italy. 90x 60 cm (Utopia Station, Venice Biennale 2003) External link: Is the World Sleeping, Sleepless, or Awake or Dreaming? by Raqs Media Collective e-flux journal issue #56 June 2014
3-screen video & sound installation, with images, text and transcripts of a simulated chat room conversation | 2003 In this installation (which also doubles as a piece of text-based one-act electronic theatre), transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and […]
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 […]
5 Pieces of Evidence | 2003/ Installation with 5 video screens, audio, and steel armature 5 Pieces of Evidence reflects on missing persons, urban myths, transitoriness, maps, and global networks. The five screens are narratively organized along the lines of a “whodunit.” Missing persons notices, street maps, demographic statistics, and images of pipelines, rail tracks, harbours, and […]
28.28 N / 77.15 E : 2001/02 (Co-Ordinates, Delhi) Raqs, with Pradip Saha, translate documentary video and audio log sheets, notes, excerpts from legal document, and stickers and signs to create a matrix of meaning around questions of space, access, barriers and the law in cites today. Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check […]
Location: 28° 28′ N, 77° 15′ ETime Zone: – | – | UTC/GMT +5.30 HoursAirports: 1Inhabitants: 10,009,200 (Delhi), 16, 713,200 (Including Agglomeration) 24 x CD Players, Headphones and 24 x 5 Minute Audio Loops/MP3 | F.0037.0000 A sound work about moving into, and circulating within the city of Delhi – a magnet as well as a […]
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 sharing of work, while at the […]
Coordinates of Everyday Life
3 videos, 1 floor vinyl, 10,000 stickers for city walls
Co-ordinates 28.8N 77.15E. Installation using video screens, sound, print, and stickers
Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); CityOne conference, Sarai/CSDS Delhi (2003); The Roomade Office for Contemporary Art, Brussels (2003); Image Asia, Copenhagen (2003); Adaptations, curated by Craig Buckley, at Apex Art gallery in New York (2004); Fredrecianum, Kassel (2004); Digital Discourse, Malta (2005 – 2006).
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE WORK OF ART
Carved marble panel, postcards, wall text
Global Health Village Manual
HTML
Made with Mrityunjay Chatterjee
Print.com, Delhi (2000); Kingdom of Piracy (2002); ISEA (2004)
