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.

Equinox

Equinox is made by Raqs in response to the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The video plays on the sense of the night coming alive with animal forms, and echoes their experience during a flashlight midnight tour of the museum where they sensed a different animatedness in the objects of the collection. 

Activo y Pasivo (Assets and Debts)

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?

A History of Photography

A History of Photography Shown at: ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) Six photographic prints2 x 2 ft. each 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 […]

Autodidact’s Transport

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.

Log Book Entry Before Storm

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

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

Will you, Beloved Stranger? is a performance piece for two readers in a designed setting featuring a rendition of two bodies of poetic work — those of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (writing in Hebrew) and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (writing in Arabic)

The Great Bare Mat

The Great Bare Mat gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, mat-weights (2nd century BC) China that served to weigh down carpets on which debaters would sit and argue philosophical points

Blood Of Stars: A walk in ten scenes

In The Blood of Stars, a media rich, site- specific installation located inside the Statsberget Cave, Raqs Media Collective catch starlight in a dying reindeer’s eye, eavesdrop on the logic of extraction inside an iron mine and explore the tunnels of an abandoned subterranean military facility inside the arctic circle that was left unused after being kept warm in preparation for a nuclear winte