Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode
Yaksha Prashna: The Riverbank Episode 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 […]
In Misadventures of A Phantom Limb Raqs gives form to this spectre as a shadowy, liquid trace of an arm
Additions, Subtractions: On Collectives and Collectivities Text by Raqs, in Manifesta Journal #8, 2009
Now and Elsewhere e-flux journal #12 2010 Text by Raqs
The Rest of Now Text by Raqs, published in “Manifesta 7 COMPANION”, one of three publications accompanying Manifesta 7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective
The Librarian’s Lucid Dream is a wallpaper carnival of impossible books made up of the index card entries for an imaginary library
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 constructs an itinerary in the footsteps of Rosa Luxemberg’s last days in Berlin
Three volunteers tell three stories. The surface underneath them is in a state of permanent revolution.
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 of terse statements by Raqs.
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
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 on unnamed islands, and the modest comfort of anchorage
In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in northern England were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne.Raqs treats found footage of the last voyage of the ship-building cranes down the Tyne river (shot by an engineer and amateur shipyard enthusiast) to create a world of passages, transitions and departures.
Skirmish is a brief, unhappy, love story with pictures and text, another of Raqs’ forays into the photo-roman form
Seven frames stand in for the seven days of the week. Each frame contains an assemblage of suspended objects.
Can You Say That Again? (5 Uneasy Pieces) features an intimate portable outdoor audio theater, framed by the “Exit” glyph of the walking man and the narration of five episodes of anchorage and dislocation. Part public furniture, part listening station.
Super-Duper Helter-Skelter Lego World is a map of the world in building blocks
The Things That Happen When Falling in Love brings together suggestions of words, and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces.
The Capital of Accumulation is a video installation that writes an oblique narrative of the relationship between metropolises and the world in counterpoint to Rosa Luxemburg’s exceptional critique of global political economy, ‘The Accumulation of Capital’.
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
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 […]
Escapement invokes clockwork, emotions, geography, fantasy and time zones to ask what is contemporaneity – what does it mean to be living in these times, in these quickening hours, these accumulating minutes, these multiplying seconds, here, now?
Acceleration and Conflicts Comments on the Cinematic Object in the 1990s and After Text by Raqs
EMOTIONAL CARTOGRAPHY TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF Text by Raqs
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 if protecting Time from its own devices.
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 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.
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.
When the Scales Fall from Your Eyes dismantles our obsessions with measurement and quantifiable evaluation by gathering scales that set out to weigh impossibilities.
How to be an artist by night Text by RaqsPublished in in Art School : Propositions for the Twentieth Century, Edited by Steven Madoff. MIT Press, Boston, 2009
The Flights of the Pink Flamingo or Historiae Sub-Rosae of Capital and the Twentieth Century Text by Kaushik Bhaumik, on Raqs Media Collective’s video diptych “The Capital of Accumulation”, published in ‘Art India’, Vol XV, Issue III, Quarter III, 2010
STAMMER, MUMBLE, SWEAT, SCRAWL, AND TIC Text by Raqs, published in e-flux journal #0 November 2008
The sculptural installation The Reserve Army examines the intersection of a personal artistic practice (in this case, that of the early 20th Century Indian sculptor Ram Kinkar Baij) with the construction of icons to represent the newly independent nation-state, as well as the rather clumsy union of Modernism and a traditional, folkloric Indian culture.
Unusually Adrift From the Shoreline is a work about darkness, light, navigation and memory. Centred on a cinema lost to time, it is intended to prompt unfamiliar thoughts in the city. Thoughts and feelings about the pleasures and the hidden perils of losing oneself: in movies, at sea, and in the oceanic expanse of time.
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’
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.
A fragment of faux classical Greek statuary, an extended arm, stretches across the plane of a poster, traversing a laterally inverted map of Europe, pointing away, below a band of flat colors, an array of would-be flags
Time Book, Exhibition Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007-08) Special thanks to the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, Homestead, PA. Hanging on the wall across from the entrance are four non-working factory time clocks. The hand of each clock is set to the digits: 1-9-8-6, the year a number of steel mills in the area closed. An […]
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.
Two short video meditations set in the post-industrial landscape of the steel town of Pittsburgh.
Sightings is a photographic experiment with decaying architecture that suggests cartographic resonances. While, Four Figures works out four ways of making sense of today’s world, mapping a frontier between precarity and possibility.
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.
Raqs imagined Gainda as a fiberglass life-size sculpture of Albrecht Dürer’s etching transformed into a carousel carriage.
Text by RaqsPublished in System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2007
The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason is an aphoristic image-text work in response to an invitation to respond to the concept: Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality. The project responds to this invitation by expressing an equation written primarily in the formal language of mathematics and by elaborating on this expression with images and a brief accompanying text.
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.
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.
Turn left from the community centre and walk fifty yards Text by Raqs
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
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 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
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 for Historical Studies, Princeton University
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.
Text by RaqsPublished in The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, 2006
Once again, to the distant observer Text by Raqs, published in SubContingent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Catalogue accompanying the exhibition
Erosion by Whispers is an intangible presence of words, whispers and rumours across our dense urban infrastructure suggesting that fragility is as much part of the experience of cities as the claim to endurance is built into their design.
Lost New Shoes confronts the notion of the ‘citizen’ by looking at the absence or void where a person may be
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 is a constellation of images, objects and annotational possibilities designed to posit a speculative archaeology of/for the present moment
The Imposter in the Waiting Room Installation with video, photography, performance, text, sound and print Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2004). National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) (2014) The Impostor in the Waiting Room is a consideration on what happens when modernity encounters its shadow. As a group of practitioners who navigate routes in and […]
Network of No_des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, re-mixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities.
Lecture Performance with And Company & Co. Das TAT, Frankfurt (2004)
Text by Raqs. Published in ‘Impostor in the Waiting Room’, the publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition, Bose Pacia Gallery, New York, 2004
Utopia is a Hearing Aid features images of the ear superscribed repeatedly with the statement “Utopia is a Hearing Aid”
In this installation transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call centre workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked Upanishadic dialogue, and video recordings of a spoken English class in Delhi
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 Delhi) and the architectural firm Atelier Bow Wow (Tokyo
5 Pieces of Evidence reflects on missing persons, urban myths, transitoriness, maps, and global networks
Documentary images of accidents, smog, crowds, police check posts, evictions, phone booths, bus stations, cyclists and communication infrastructure are positioned in counterpoint to legal excerpts and administrative notes
A sound work about moving into, and circulating within the city of Delhi – a magnet as well as a springboard for daily migrations. Delhi is a city that wakes up to new arrivals everyday
OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) 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 […]
In listing a set of latitude and longitude measurements, bracketed by two calendar years, this installation names a citycalled Delhi and a time that feels like the first two years of the twenty-first century
The History & Practice of Cinematography in India is a collection of transcripts of interviews with veteran and working cameramen, texts, archival photographs, production stills, bibliography, a timeline and other resources on the history of cinematographic practice in India.
New Maps & Old Territories: A dialogue between Yagnavalkya and Gargi in Cyberia Text by RaqsPublished in Sarai Reader 01, The Public Domain, Sarai CSDS, Delhi 2001
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
GVHM 1.0 is an eccentric assemblage of material found in web searches that suggests the fragility of the body, especially the labouring body in cyberspace