“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 through a scalar lens, 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.’By juxtaposing this microscopic ubiquity with five million documented pandemic incidents, the text underscores how a seemingly […]

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 […]

This essay takes a Bengali term anta(h)shira—used to denote an intravenous vein—as its starting point, treating it as a metaphor for the subtle, capillary-like currents that run through bodies and social imaginaries. The text unpacks how such culturally embedded words defy neat translation, revealing fissures in our shared vocabularies. It argues for a practice of continual […]