{"id":6621,"date":"2014-02-21T13:41:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T13:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/works.raqsmediacollective.net\/?p=6621"},"modified":"2025-04-09T21:40:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T21:40:05","slug":"corrections-to-the-first-draft-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/works.raqsmediacollective.net\/index.php\/2014\/02\/21\/corrections-to-the-first-draft-of-history\/6621","title":{"rendered":"Corrections to the First Draft of History"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Corrections to the First Draft of History<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shown at: Frith\u00a0Street Gallery, London (2014) | National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2014) | K21, D\u00fcsseldorf (2018)\u00a0
<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newsprint, chalkboard paint and chalk<\/em>
Dimensions variable<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The saying \u201cThe first draft of history\u201d refers to the relevance of journalism. It reflects the motto of \u201ctoday\u2019s news is tomorrow\u2019s history.\u201d Raqs refuses to see history as static and set in stone. They regard it as a palimpsest that is permanently in flux due to overwriting, overlaying, and reinterpreting. In their work Corrections to the First Draft of History<\/em>, Raqs \u201ccorrect\u201d the pages of newspapers by drawing and painting over them with black blackboard ink. The words and sentence fragments they write over the original texts in chalk are mostly taken from the \u201cFirst Book of Reading,\u201d which is a primer that was put together in 1850 by Pyari Charan Sarkar, a Calcutta educationist in order to help Bengali students learn English. The learning of English, in this instance, meant then, and continues to mean even now, a familiarization with an entirely new system of organizing reality – and a primary grasp, or claim, on techniques of becoming subjects and agents in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a0Corrections to the First Draft of History\u00a0\u2018rewrites\u2019 on\u00a0newsprint of the world so as to speak of making new\u00a0sets of meanings for what is considered history in\u00a0our present times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,14,229,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lexica","category-practices","category-unledgered","category-works","has-thumbnail"],"gutentor_comment":0,"yoast_head":"\nCorrections to the First Draft of History - Works Raqs Media Collective<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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