Undoing Walls| 2017 1’ 55” Animation loop, Variable Dimensions Can a “dysfunctional” wall structure be imagined so as to question the original intentions of a Government? Can a “welcoming” and useful wall be created; one that serves the communities that it is meant to separate and which proposes an alternative solution to human segregation, when […]
Edited by Raqs Media Collective, Theodor Ringborg (2017)Read By, Written By is a poetry book compiled to accompany the 2017 Bonniers Konsthall exhibition The Image of War. In a kind of poetic relay the editors, Raqs Media Collective from Delhi, and the curator of the exhibition, Theodor Ringborg from Stockholm, contacted people from around the world to […]
51 Personae expands the possibilities of the 11th Shanghai Biennale: Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counterarguments, and Stories curated by Raqs Media Collective, as a series of gatherings that took place in different parts of Shanghai between 12 November 2016 and 12 March 2017.
Communard Biscuits (2017) 3 D Printing, Silicone mould, flour, water, salt500 biscuits, 9 x 1 x 1 cm (each) Exhibited at Whitworth, Manchester A hard tack biscuit from the Paris Commune of 1871 was 3D scanned, 3D printed, a mould made and facsimile biscuits baked. History in facsimile, waiting for a bite. Made in collaboration with the People’s […]
Presentomorrow Installation with Video, Still Images and Animated Text Exhibited at Mondialité curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza, Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels 2017 The installation presented within the framework of Mondialité makes references to several of their previous installations and to the writings of Édouard Glissant. It evokes the fact that the concepts, the […]
Text by Raqs, published as a monograph for “The Contemporary Condition” series, series editors Geoff Cox + Jacob Lund, 2017
The Return of Tipoo’s Tiger | 2017 Performance, 2 video projections, masks, paper plaques V&A Museum | London Imagine an Eighteenth century South Indian automaton of a devouring tiger commissioned by Tipoo Sultan becoming a holy relic in the Europe of 4016 CE – a fetish object worshipped by the future submarine inhabitants of the […]
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)
Site specific Installation Lincoln Brayford Pool, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK (2016) Perhaps (An Investigation Outside The Laws of Thought) The arcs in the sculpture are portals. And as portals, they recall George Boole’s (who was a lincoln person) ‘logic gates’ ‐ conceptual sites of entry and exit for answers to questions that can end […]
Text accompanying the performance titled Memorophilia held at Tate Modern (2016).
Theory Opera Performances including furniture, architectural detail, podium design, performer’s platforms, projection surfaces and other functional, ornamental details Shanghai Biennale, China (2016-2017) “When theory gets to work, it sings.” For the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Raqs intended to produce a form to play out the tension that this distribution of intelligence between theory and practice creates. […]
Text by Raqs, published under “Superhumanity” for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial
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.
Meanwhile Elsewhere | 2014 Words, Clock-face Design on Vinyl Raqs Media Collective Berlin | Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh What begins with our eyes, travels to the brain, courses to our heart, and then returns to our eyes. Reading a feeling or a moment is something that happens between different aspects of consciousness. Reading off the walls […]
Seven Billion and One | 2015 Variations of the infinity sign in gold pigment, on pages of newspapers coated with black ink (English, Hindi, Urdu), 108 sheets of 22 x 14.5 inches SMFA (School of the Museum of Fine Arts) | Boston
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 […]
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.
Homo Speculos 5 true mirrors in matt-black columns (38 x 38 x 168 cm, 38 x 38 x 162 cm, 38 x 38 x 138 cm, 38 x 38 x 128 cm, 38 x 38 x 118 cm) Adam Aronson Gallery, Laumier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Missouri (2015) Five true mirrors show you as you […]
Coronation Park echoes and amplifies the accidental epiphany that Raqs experienced a long time ago about the nature of power at the eponymous derelict quasi-ceremonial space where relics of the British Raj are kept for the consideration of an absent public at the outskirts of Delhi.
Bureaux of Raqs and Faqs Found furniture, index cards, words, plaques, electronic word displays, text and a scenario Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2015)
Fever, Fever | 2015 Digital video, photo-constellations, match boxes, archival prints, 6’29’’ min (played in loop) Global Imaginations | Museum De Lakenhal | Leiden, The Netherlands
Art in the Age of Collective Intelligence | 2015 40 photo prints on Moab metallic silver paper, giclee, 24 inches x 24 inches each Adam Aronson Gallery, Laumier Sculpture Park, St. Louis | Missouri If the World is a Fair Place Then.. | 2015 Laser cut steel bands, words | Exhibited at Laumier Sculpture Park, […]
Luminous Will School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015) Does history repeat itself, or simply rehearse its moves in anticipation? Can we read chronicles in terms of deferrals and déjà-vu rather than in terms of climaxes and closures? “Luminous Will” refers to an eponymous work by Raqs Media Collective, where the hands of […]
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 Namak Haram’s Philosophy, Revised Treated Photographic Diptych, 96.6 inches x 24.4 inches Words, A user’s manual, Gallery 320, New Delhi (2012) Every book demands another, but not all of them get written. Every debt demands to be paid, but not all are redeemed. Then there are the debts that we owe to the all that we read, which […]
Drawing animation Duration: 3 minutes Untimely Calendar/Asamayavali, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) In the world of labour, men and women, animals and devices come together and diverge in all sorts of interesting ways. The coupling and uncoupling of gears and wings, of claws and hands, of hooves and feet, of algorithms […]
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 […]
Editor’s note: The three curatorial projects City as studio, Art as a place and Common ground conceived between 2009- 2014 are an extension of Raqs’s engagement with the creative community that reimagine the questions around cultural infrastructures. (1) CITY AS STUDIO City as Studio brings together people from a range of social, cultural and media […]
One Meter of Truth (Emotion) Steel table with wooden top, printed canvas (58”x 58”, 1m steel measure) ‘Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar’, NGMA (2014) During a rehearsal process for a work being made with theatre artists, Raqs began to seek a language for states of feeling, and the body, that were at a tangent to the way in […]
It’s Possible Because It’s Possible Shown at: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayos (CA2M), Madrid (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico (2015); Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires (2015) It’s Possible Because It’s Possible is the fruit of a collaboration between Museo Universitario Art Contemporaneo (MUAC), the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), and the Fundacion […]
Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) Media rich, concept driven, formally multi-faceted, playful, urgent, replete with philosophical density – this is the kind of art that addresses all our faculties – intellectual, emotional and sensory. A visitor to this exhibition is invited to be a witness, to see himself and […]
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 […]
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.
Carbon Twilight Video loop Duration: 3:13 minutes National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi (2014) The gatekeepers of the treasury have left the gates of the bank to stand guard over the twilight. A consignment of carbon moves between undisclosed stations under their watch. Sometimes, the shortest distance between the coalmine and the bank […]
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 […]
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?
Text by Raqs. Published in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Editors Jill H. Casid + Aruna D’ Souza. Clark Studies in the Visual Arts, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown & Yale University Press, 2014
Six photographic prints 2 x 2 ft. each Exhibited at Untimely Calendar, NGMA, New Delhi (2014) 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 of their letters also become a way […]
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.
A Fortunate Spell of Pleasant Amnesia Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper 305 x 61 inches Exhibited in Clark House initiated ‘Artists Against AFSPA’ at NGMA, Mumbai (2011), ‘Waiting for the Wind’, Experimenter, Kolkata (2014) and Untimely Calendar, NGMA (2014)
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’ […]
Log Book Entry Before Storm Site specific transformation In ‘Whorled Explorations’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi 2014 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. The work re-introduces circulation into this still […]
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 […]
Performance, Architecture, Textual Collation, 2013 Architectural collaborators: Efrat-Kowalsky Architects Video of performance: 43 minutes Video tech – Yoav Bezaleli & Oscar Abush Readers: Amit Gour and Ruba Amira Salameh Exhibited at ‘Host & Guest’ curated by Steven Henry Madoff at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2013) will you, beloved stranger, ever witness […]
Video loop Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2013) In the present world, ever since the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, the system of longitudes beginning and ending at an arbitrarily decided degree zero located at the Greenwich Observatory near London creates a notional global central axis and degrees of peripherality. This convention is […]
The Great Bare Mat Series encapsulates Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012-2013) The piece was designed as a carpet for the staging of conversations, and installed at the feet of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-fold 17th-century Japanese screen from the Gardner Museum’s collection. “The Great Bare Mat” gains inspiration from two exquisite Han bronze bears, […]
Extra Time Chronus Centre, Shanghai (2013) Extra Time opened as the chronic Art Center’s inaugural show. The show focuses on Raqs’ investigations of time and temporality in different registers that span the spectrum of their diverse practice ranging from performance, to installation, architectural ensembles, video, and photography. By creating striking constellations of images, by using […]
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 […]
Workbook by Raqs Media Collective with Kaushik Bhowmik, a digital publishing serious (2013)
Text, Illumination and Surface Modification of an Abandoned House 24 Jor Bagh, Delhi (2013) The House of Everything and Nothing is an exploration of the infinity of worlds that Raqs Media Collective inhabit. In 2013, Raqs asked a software programmer to come up with an algorithm that could help render the pattern generated data harvested […]
Extra Time Conversation between Chang Tsong-Zung and Raqs Media Collective Published in ‘Extra Time’, editor Chen Yun. Featuring contributions by Raqs Media Collective, Chong Tzung Chang, Huang Chien Hung, Lu Xinghua, Gao Shiming, Mou Sen & Li Zhenhua, 2013
Fruits of Labour (2012) 100 orange fruit trees, industrial sizes fans, framed copies of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar | Public Art Project at REAKT: Olhares e Processos, Guimaraes Approaching the sense of exhaustion and hopelessness of the end of a factory’s life cycle, the artists established a link between a call published in a newspaper […]
A Phrase, Not a Word Exhibition with videos, large-scale prints, a typographic sculpture and a sound installation Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi (2012) With “A Phrase, Not A Word”, Raqs’ diverse and eclectic practice becomes a playground for ideas and reflections on conversations and the notion of language. The exhibition gathers an arsenal of images, objects, voices, […]
Guesswork Frith Street Gallery, London (2012) The works featured in Guesswork invite the viewer to consider what it means to measure infinity and to seize time rather than to be captive to the passing moment. By working with pixels and proverbs, circuits and syntax, Raqs turn thoughts into images and images into questions. The works ask us […]
The Great Bare Mat and Constellation Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston (2012) The “Great Bare Mat” of the title refers to a carpet made for the exhibition, a surface for the staging of conversations, displayed at the base of “The Vinegar Tasters”, a two-part 17th century Japanese screen from the Museum’s Collection. The carpet’s repeated […]
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 […]
Eccentric Orbits Four looped videos featuring pixels and the cosmos (1’07”, 1’ 15”,1’ 18”,1’ 31”) A Different Gravity Art Fair, Delhi How different would things be if they were subject to another gravity? Eccentric Orbits is a suite of four videos featuring mysterious activities in a world that weighs things differently than the one we think […]
A Different Gravity Furniture, Words, Mirror, Illumination, Carpet, Print India Art Fair, Project 88 (2012) A Different Gravity presents a flying carpet, a timetable, a wrong chair, and a mirror stage of some sort. You can play with all of these like you would in a scrabble game, and in the mix can have flying […]
Archetypes and Other Permissive Forms – an assemblage of metallic forms attached etched to twelve clear, coloured acrylic plinths, emerged as a gesture of reciprocity
Primary Education of the Autodidact Vinyl transfer on building windows Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2012) The Primary Education of the Autodidact, commissioned by the Audain Gallery, is out of a series of works by Raqs Media Collective that explores knowledge, power, utterance, and silence. It directly addresses the notion and problematic of the autodidact, and also […]
A quorum of players face off across a long well lit table over an abundant flow of wine in a play of words and thought.
phantoroman: SHORE LEAVE (Two Love Stories) Single channel projected digital slide show, gilded frame, 90 x 120 cm Latitude 28 Gallery, New Delhi (2012) A sailor, a prostitute, a city, the search for warmth, and a slice of snatched time; Shore Leave is a short story in words and images about words and the unsaid, about desire […]
The Robin Hood of Wisdom Printed Cards, Guerrilla Actions Copenhagen Art Festival, Denmark (2012) 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. “We thought of the community of readership, which […]
Installation Drawing on wall made of 3mm copper, brass and steel metal strips. 105 inches x 67 inches Part of ‘A Different Gravity’, solo booth, Project 88, India Art Fair (2012).; “Untimely calendar”, National Gallery of Modern Art | New Delhi (2014) Three metallic strips – brass, copper and steel– make a possible ‘doorway’ to […]
Cybermohalla Ensemble/ Nikolaus Hirsch / Michel Müller, Copublished by Sarai-CSDS and Sternberg Press (2011)
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 […]
Presented by Shveta Sarda This book is an appreciation of the listening, walking, reading, interviewing, collecting, questioning, mapping, recording, drawing, image-making and writing done by the hundreds of Independent Fellows associated with Sarai over the last decade. The works by the Fellows have been publicly archived through postings in the Sarai Reader-list and in the […]
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.
After Hours : Art, Imagination and the Residue of the Working Day Text by Raqs
Text by Cuauhtémoc Medina, eflux journal #38
A letter to Amália Jyran, who will be fifty-four in 2061 CE Text by Raqs, written to accompany Raqs’ contribution to the Momentum Nordic Biennale of 2011
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 […]
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 the deaf community.
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.
Seen at Secunderabagh | 2011 With Zuleikha Chaudhari Performative installation with actors, video projection, sets The starting point for Seen at Secundrabagh is a photograph taken in 1857 by the war photographer Felice Beato three months after a bloody mutiny within the British East India Company. Four men and a horse pose in front of the lens, […]
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 […]
Reading Light Siege du Parti Communiste Francaise, Festival d’Automne, Paris (2011) Reading Light – the work presented by Raqs in Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic building for the French Communist Party at the Place Colonel Fabien – was a set of illuminated signs that use text, typography, light sources and electricity to conjure a renewal of human aspirations. […]
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)
How to get from here to there Photographs mounted on acrylic glass, neon, Series of 6, each 64 x 94 x 10 cm 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 step of […]
A Frame of Mind: Researching Documentaries Text by Raqs
Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode Text by Raqs
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.
36 Planes of Emotions extends the palette of emotions to include states of collective potential.
‘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.
Published in Gimme Shelter: Global Discourses in Aesthetics, editors: Jos de Mul + Renée van de Vali, 2011
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 […]
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’. […]
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