Artist of the month: Raqs Media Collective - Art and beyond

Raqs members say that they see their work as opening out the possibility of a conversation that embodies a deep ambivalence towards modernity

Raqs Media Collective team

Raqs Media Collective is an art collective established in 1992 by a group of three Delbi-based art practitioners - Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They founded this collective after graduating from the AJK Mass Communication and Research Centre at the Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi, and today their presence is noticeable in multiple roles in the international art scene.“The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs,” they write about their art practice that cannot be limited to any particular area.

They decided to set up this collective while working together on their first film, Half the Night Left, and the Universe to Comprehend, remember the team members. That 16mm film has been lost but the team gained strength. Over the years, their practices have widened, and now they create art, films, curate shows, organise stage events, edit books and also collaborate with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors thus exploring new possibilities.

“Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures,” according to the team members. “Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with time in all its tenses through anticipation, conjecture, entanglement and excavation. Conjuring figures of cognitive and sensory acuteness, Raqs’ work reconfigures perceptional fields and demands that everyone looks at what they take for granted, anew.”

Raqs has exhibited their works and curated shows in many parts of the world, including Documenta 11, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition, held at Kassel in Germany and the Biennales of Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Sydney and Sao Paulo, amongst others. Further, their works have been shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Tate Britain (London), Art Unlimited (Basel), Mori Museum (Tokyo), SALT (Istanbul) and at the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries (London), as well as many other international institutions.

Other solo exhibitions (and projects) of the group include – Pamphilos at Fast Forward Festival 6, Athens (2019); Still More World at Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019); Twilight Language at Manchester Art Gallery (2017-2018); Everything Else is Ordinary at K21 Museum for 21st Century Art, Dusseldorf (2018); If It’s Possible, It’s Possible, MUAC, Mexico City (2015) and Untimely Calendar (2014-2015) at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. Spread over 3,200 square meters of the galley, with work spanning over a decade, it was the largest and most wide ranging exhibition of the group’s work to date. The collective called this show as prospective, not retrospective.

Raqs members say that they see their work as opening out the possibility of a conversation that embodies a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property.

Their work is founded on the concept of “raqs”, the state of kinetic contemplation achieved by Whirling Dervishes. This is reflected in ‘Lost New Shoes’ (2005), a multimedia installation centered around a pile of 100 pairs on new shoes - metonyms for the human beings who might have worn them and their precarious journeys through life.

During the 1990s Raqs made a number of documentary films, including ‘In the Eye of the Fish’ (1997), ‘Present Imperfect, Future Tense’ (1999) and a thirteen-part television series, ‘Growing Up (1995)’. They continued to explore the themes in this series in their subsequent work as well, including the urban landscape, the meaning and uses of media and technology, the nature of knowledge and what it means to learn. Through their work, learning becomes not only an artistic impulse but a wider human faculty associated with the capacity of individuals and societies for imaginative and ethical innovation.

In 2001, Raqs co-founded the Sarai Programme and the Sarai Reader Series at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, with Prof. Ravi Vasudevan and Prof. Ravi Sundaram, both faculty at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) as directors of the programme. Over the years, they have since made works in many mediums, including installations, film, photography, print and online works, archive related projects, public interventions, essays, publications, lecture-performances, engagements with pedagogical procedures and collaborations, often working with contemporaries from a number of different disciplines. Over the last two decades, the Sarai programme at CSDS has arguably been South Asia’s most prominent and productive platform for research and reflection on the transformation of urban space and contemporary realities, especially with regard to cities, data and information, law, and media infrastructures.

Based in Delhi, Raqs Media Collective often uses that city as the subject of their work, and in their engagement with modernity they often display a lived relationship with myths and histories from South Asia.

(Learn more about them at: www.raqsmediacollective.net/)