This essay examines how established practices and ingrained habits can both confine and shape creative and curatorial processes. It poses the question, “What is the mechanism — and how do we seek it — of ‘freeing’ the weights of habitual narrative entrapments?” prompting questions related to the forms and premises of the “system ofgovernance” that […]
“Being anywhere inside a thicket means having to deal with a tango between tenses, between the consequences of what yesterday has done, and what tomorrow will bring, and what the present proposes, all at the same time.” Moving between the sit-ins at Shaheen Bagh, the farmers’ protests, and pandemic lockdowns, Raqs invokes the thicket as […]
“The image making and processing capacity happen continuously, just as respiration, or digestion does, The new image machines breathe, digest, dream and excrete pictures. they don’t just ‘take’ them.” This essay introduces Raqs’ concept of the “event-shaped hole,” suggesting that photographs can act as pieces of evidence, even when the events themselves are absent from […]
Text by Raqs, published in ‘The Collections Book, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary’, 2021
The first publication accompanying Afterglow, Yokohama Triennale 2020, curated by Raqs Media Collective.
Still More World Solo ExhibitionMathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019) Still More World confronts the thresholds of sustainability and to consider what futures we might illuminate—or extinguish—in our quest to shape the world. It is a delicate interplay between the material and immaterial, reminding us that every illuminated skyline carries within it echoes […]
“Every museum is a time machine with multiple pedals for acceleration, all movingonly in reverse gear. Even a museum that addresses the contemporary immediatelytransforms the present into a packaged relic, and then you exit through the gift shop,again. This means that the museum of the future is somewhat of an oxymoron. Atime machine that moves […]
“This paradox of memory is a negotiation between having to remember, the obligation tomourn, the uncertainty of moments and conditions of its activation, the inability to recall, andthe slow grinding requirement to forget and move on.“ This essay reflects on the complex relationship between memory, war, and public art. Drawing upon historical events and personal […]
In this essay, Raqs Media Collective frames COVID‑19, noting that an estimated 10³¹ (ten nonillion) viral particles float in the air at any moment, making viruses the planet’s most abundant “bad news” relative to human ‘newsworthiness.’The text underscores how a seemingly invisible entity can reshape global social and biological networks. Through these reflections, Raqs probes how […]
This essay uses the concept of “recension”—ongoing revision—to reflect on three decades of Raqs Media Collective’s practice amid economic turmoil, social unrest, and a mounting pandemic. Tracing moments from the creation of Sarai’s public‑sharing infrastructures and early social‑software experiments, it argues that creative and curatorial work is sustained through collective re‑apprehension, infrastructural generosity, and the […]
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