Twisted Time
Twisted Time (2024) is formed from two glass bicycle wheels mounted on a mirrored plinth where they rotate slowly
WORKS
Borderlands
Borderlands (2024) is a series of seven laser engravings on black sandpaper. Rendered black on black, the hard-to-decipher drawings riff off medieval depictions of animals where the intended creature and its depiction only nominally match.
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.
Autoluminous (Everything Is Burning)
Autoluminous is an index of our awareness of the inscription of energy into every waking, sleeping and dreaming moment.
Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong | Annual Artist’s Lecture
Hosted at Asia Art Archive’s Library, this year’s Annual Artist’s Lecture welcomes Raqs Media Collective as the guest speakers.
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone
The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time-Cone, published by Jencks Foundation (2023), takes the form of an artist book, and foregrounds text over image. Mirroring the film’s visual textures, the five voices in the pamphlet register varying distances from what is seen on the screen and its potential elucidations: voiceover, description of images, words on screen, added layers of annotations and meta-annotations.
All, Humans
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.
Planktons in the Sea: A Few Questions Regarding the Qualities of Time
e-flux journal #27, September 2011, Raqs Media Collective
In The Theatre of Memory: The Work of Contemporary Art in the Photographic Archive
In The Theatre of Memory: The Work of Contemporary Art in the Photographic Archive Text by Raqs
soDA Magazine Story
soDA magazine 19, Zurich (2002); Casebook (2014, AGYU Canada), Raqs presented the concept of “Event-shaped Hole” which translated into the essay The Event-shaped Hole and the Photographic Image in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2021 Casebook (2014, AGYU Canada) A photograph is an image of an event-shaped-hole, and as witnesses to such perforations we could […]
Tears (are not only from weeping)
Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, cry out aloud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.
Do Harmonious Friends cause dissonance?
Do Harmonious Friends cause dissonance?Blackboard paint, newspaper, chalk, text, silkscreen, glass eyes6 frames of 55 x 70 cm each The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) An owl and a donkey interpolate themselves, indicating the simultaneity of leaving and returning. Tyll of Braunschweig teaches us the trick of being on both sides of a […]
Memes and Fables
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 […]
31 Days
31 Days, 2020 Video with Calligraphy, Pixels, Sound Duration: 17:45 mins The Laughter of Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021); The Pandemic Circle at Stamps Gallery, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, Expo Chicago – online (2020) and CC: World, Haus der Kulturen der Welt- online, Berlin (2020) A conversation in images, missives to selves and world, […]
Making bets while knowing nothing
Making bets while knowing nothing Text by Raqs, published in The Collections Book, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Sharing our Sources
The first publication accompanying Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale 2020, curated by Raqs Media Collective.
Listening: Active Presence of Aura of the Ordinary
Listening: Active Presence of Aura of the Ordinary Suraj, Shamsher and Neelofar were part of the Cybermohalla Ensemble (2001-13), and co-authrored innumerable books, broadsheets, and art works with the Ensemble. Notable among them are Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis (Penguin-India, 2010, English translation of Bahurupiya Shehr, Rajkamal Prakashan, 2007), and Cybermohalla […]
21 Personae
21 Personae is an extension of the 51 Personae project curated by Raqs Media Collective for the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17)
Time Devices (2011- 2024)
“One question that stayed with us and has proven to continue getting exponentially more complex is that of time. The 90s had posed the scrambling of time in ideas of development, progress, or modernity.During that time, as very young people, we examined and re-examined what progress could even mean. We have, from then, been unpacking […]
The Assurance Clock & Toxicare
The clock in the poster is an embodiment of assurance, the opposite of alarm
To Ask, When Empty
A suite of six uniquely colourful lenticular prints offer a dance of terse imperatives at the intersection of will and necessity
Toxicity in Equal Measure
A singular array of surfaces in materials that range from leather to metal celebrate the essential instability of all substances
Re Run
n revisiting and re-staging Cartier Bresson’s photograph in Shanghai, Raqs meet the conditions of the self-fulfilling prophecy invoked by the event captured in the original image.
Twilight Language
Twilight Language signals a lighthouse semaphore for all that is lost and found between errant longitudes, infected histories and contagious futures. This is the time when everything changes; memorials defect, communards bake biscuits, moths mutate, divers rise, clocks speak in tongues. Animals, machines, and humans recover grounds of equality and conversation. Words turn incandescent, enigma shadows everything, twilight finds its language.
Dyeing Inayat Khan
With Dyeing Inayat Khan, Raqs extends their practice of intervening with video in archival and historical traces.
Memorophilia
Text accompanying the performance titled Memorophilia held at Tate Modern (2016).
Night & Day, Day & Night
A 24 hour clock where the usual digits are displaced with words in the Devanagri script relating to varying scales of time.
Asankh/ Countless
The material infinitude that makes up the real world, Raqs argues, is a swirling, entangled mass of vital, corporeal wills to live and exist actualized as forms of matter and sentience
Lost in Search of Time
While retrieving the time gained in searching for all that is lost and found one can admit to a condition that one suspects that one shares with most people in the world today, of being lost, in search of time.
Plaques for Coronation Park
Circular plaques created as a part of Coronation Park (2015). They have inscribed statements adapted from George Orwell’s parable about the brittleness of Imperial authority, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936)
The Museum of Lost Constellations
The Museum of Lost Constellations is an attempt to recover thirteen of them into memory through a set of objects that recall the names and lore connected to each lost constellation.
A Day in the Life of Kiribati
A Day in the Life of Kiribati gives the time of Kiribati, the first land on Earth to switch the calendar over to 2000, and which could be the first place on this planet to disappear with rising sea levels because of global warming
With an Untimely Calendar
Edited by Shveta Sarda, Published by the National Gallery of Modern Art in conjunction with the solo exhibition of Raqs Media Collective, Asamayavali/ Untimely Calendar, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 2014.
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.
The Last International & Three Meetings That May Have Happened, Underwater or Mid-Air
The Last International is a conduit to reach the future and its freedom, which is already present in our time as its biggest public secret — a world beyond Capital.
Corrections to the First Draft of History
Corrections to the First Draft of History ‘rewrites’ on newsprint of the world so as to speak of making new sets of meanings for what is considered history in our present times.
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.
Blood Of Stars: A walk in ten scenes
Site specific intervention at the Statsberget Cave Single screen, Video, 13 minutes Extracts from a Future History | Lulea The Blood of Stars invites us to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a fugitive from the stars, sleeping deep inside the earth and the veins of warm-blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it reads meteorites […]
Diagram for the Last International
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
Time Capsule from 2011 (TO BE OPENED IN 2061)
Time Capsule, from 2011, is a time travel device which makes it possible for Raqs to claim its contemporaneity with the future
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.
Casebook
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Surjection by Raqs Media Collective of New Delhi, held at the Art Gallery of York University from 22 September through 4 December, 2011, and curated by Philip Monk
Premonition
Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011) Sometimes, not even the insistent repetition of phenomena finds you prepared for the uncanny tug of premonition. Premonition: the anticipatory call of things forever about to happen. Even if nothing happens. Even if the emergency lights flicker away a wasting sense of urgency. The Impostor in the Waiting Room 2004/ Installation […]
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
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks
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.
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.
A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him
A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him presents its viewer with a silent song of a thousand words, a bier of iron rods for the repose of a fallen man, a setting sun, and an empty chair awaiting a visitor
3 Caveats On A Barewall | 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually
3 Caveats On A Barewall & 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually 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 distance.
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