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.

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.

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 from weeping) Video loop, LED panel Duration: 05:59 “Laughter of Tears”, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2021) 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, […]

Sharing our Sources

Text by Raqs (and extracts from essays), in the first publication accompanying “Afterglow”, Yokohama Triennale 2020, curated by Raqs Media Collective

21 Personae

21 Personae is an extension of the 51 Personae project curated by Raqs Media Collective for the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17). In Barcelona, the project coincides with the In the Open or in Stealth 2018 – 17 March 2019), curated for MACBA by Raqs Media Collective and coordinated by Hiuwai Chu

Time Devices (2011- 18)

Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat | 4 min 31 seconds Animated Horological Video, Words Click here to watch the video (email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access) A Day in the Life of Kiribati Clock, nameplate, tape Exhibited at Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar at National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) The Ecliptic | […]

The Assurance Clock & Toxicare 

Featured in digital posters It’s Urgent! Part II & III, Luma Westbau, Zurich 2018 The Assurance Clock The clock in the poster is an embodiment of assurance, the opposite of alarm. This is an attitude that could be seen cultivated as an antidote to the epidemic of caution and false-alarms that characterizes our time. The […]

To Ask, When Empty

To Ask, When Empty |2018 5 Lenticular Panels, 1ft. X 2ft each Project 88 | Mumbai A suite of six uniquely colourful lenticular prints offer a dance of terse imperatives at the intersection of will and necessity: “to ask when empty, to pour when full.”

Toxicity in Equal Measure

Toxicity in Equal Measure Layered sheets with perforations on felt, leather, rubber, copper, steel, cardboard, fabric and acrylic, with gold impressions. 22 frames, 1 ft. X 1 ft. each Project 88 | Mumbai (2018) A singular array of surfaces in materials that range from leather to metal celebrate the essential instability of all substances. Nothing […]

Re Run

Re-Run | 2013 Video loop ‘Extra Time’ at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai (2013) |  ‘Untimely Calendar’ at NGMA, New Delhi (2014) | ‘Raqs Media Collective’ at K21, Dusseldorf (2018) Henri Cartier-Bresson took a photograph of a bank run in Shanghai in December 1948: A crowd of people desperate to get their money out of a bank in […]

Dyeing Inayat Khan 

Dyeing Inayat Khan (2016) 2- channel video installation, color and sound New Sensorium, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2016) | Nature Morte, Bikaner House, Delhi (2021) Animation and editing: Ikroop Sandhu and Rajan Singh Click here to watch the full video (email us on studio@raqsmediacollective.net to request access)

Night & Day, Day & Night

Night & Day, Day & Night 24-hour clock, words, 5 feet diameter Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014) In twenty four words about duration in Hindi, breath gives way to blink, the origin anticipates the end, revolutions and eclipses consider each other. It happens all the time.

Asankh/ Countless

Asankh/ Countless | 2014 Digital Print on ACP, acrylic (6 x 4 ft.) | Untimely Calendar, solo show at NGMA (2014) 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. Infinity has room […]

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

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 […]

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, New Delhi (2014).

Equinox

Equinox Cutouts, animation, video loop Part of ‘The Great Bare Mat & Constellation’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2013) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) A carnival: an autumnal solstice celebration of all that is animate and alive. Horses lose their heads, fish leave their shadows, Diana, the goddess of the hunt is in […]

The Last International & Three Meetings That May Have Happened, Underwater or Mid-Air

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 […]

Corrections to the First Draft of History

Corrections to the First Draft of History Newsprint, chalkboard paint and chalk Dimensions variable Exhibited in an eponymous solo exhibition, at Frith Street Gallery, London (2014) followed by Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) In 1850, a man called Peary Churn Sarkar wrote up a primer for Bengalis to learn English with. He called it, ‘The First Book of […]

Autodidact’s Transport

Autodidact’s Transport Train carriage interior refurnishing, specially woven fabric, vinyl, short films, orations Public Art Project, Gwangju Folly, Gwangju Metro System, South Korea 2014 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’ […]

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

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 […]

More Salt In Your Tears

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. […]

The Untold Intimacy of Digits

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 […]

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

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 […]

Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World

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 […]

Love is Engineering

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 […]

With Respect to Residue

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 […]

A Dying Man Sings Of That Which Felled Him

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 […]

3 Caveats On A Barewall | 3 Caveats To Be Worn Casually

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 […]