On a black round surface that resembles a clock electrical pulses of words emerge, dictating modes of subjective relation to time. It is a clock, but one whose symbolic circuitry has been systemically altered. Translating the immeasurability of time in an alternative system of words, The Ecliptic (2014) encourages us to rethink how we relate to this omnipresent feature that commands our life. Rethinking flux and ecosystemic connections as deeply related with how we mediate life, Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, b. 1965, New Delhi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, b. 1968, New Delhi, Monica Narula, b. 1969, New Delhi) propose a poetic reading of management. The clock is itself a returning figure in their practice, one that is strongly linked with the analysis of governance and the resilient character of subjects. This comes as much from the study of the internal rhythms of megalopolises such as Delhi, but also through a reflection about the conditions of labor and cultural production in a broader sense.
Raqs Media Collective was founded in New Delhi in 1992. This multidisciplinary group, where art-making overlaps with curating, emerges from a research-drawn practice where urbanism takes a central role. In 2002 they founded Sarai, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, a platform used by many researchers, artists, and academics. They are concerned with cities as larger stages for societal transformation, where the question of the status of immigrants, the transformations brought up by the globalization, and the shift in economical conditions plays a central role in human ecologies.
Approaching systemic thinking from a plural angle, Raqs often change their working medium, creating not only public-space interventions, but also installations, lecture-performances, and pedagogical workshops either independently, in international educational institutions, or through Sarai. A collaborative approach is central to their practice, which also encompasses books and an extended online presence, reflecting on the structures of support and communication as essential mediating tools. MM
self-presentation:
We have an unfinished work, Black Waters, on the intersections between the turbulent chronicles of the Andaman Islands (a small archipelago in the Bay of Bengal) and a contested history of photography and war. We worked on this for more than a year in early 1990s, but could never raise enough funds to get the project off the ground. But that period of researching and waiting turned out to be eventful, and made us hungry. We encountered so many archives, so many images, so many riddles, so many paradoxes, so many testimonies, so many truths, so many landscapes. We began to get a sense of how vast geographies and multiple biographies overlap and hide within each other. We understood that we live in a world of an uneven and disaggregated time horizons. Some questions need longer waiting. Some survival methods need faster tracks. We are what our ideas of time are.
