Raqs Media Collective: Moving Image Programme

Single-screen video

38 minutes

The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet is a film-installation that combines historical photographs from collections in London and Delhi with video, animation, and a soundscape of overlapping voices set in a sparse, barely furnished space. Stories leak, histories collide; bones, bodies, faces and handwriting blur; crowds gather and move en masse, cosmonauts land on unfamiliar terrain. Intentionally open-ended and anti-documentary, this work examines how collectivity and anonymity have been represented over time and how these renditions contribute to ongoing crises of identity and entitlement. 

Raqs Media Collective explain: 'This work brings together several strands of thinking in our practice - a concern with the measurement of human forms, an interest in archival documents and images and a way of thinking about situations of intense conflict. This work grew out of several research processes undertaken over a number of years in India and in Britain. It is also the first instance of our attempt to find a cross-over between installation, film and the lecture-performance form that we have been developing over the years of our practice.'

2 x synchronised screen video

20 minutes

Strikes at Time is a lucid dream, readings from an occassional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night. 

In that no man's land annexed by the awakening mind from the fatigue of the labouring day, the work weaves together a disquisition on time in the form of a discreet annotation on the philosopher Jacques Rancière's The Nights of Labour, together with renditions of the found text of a worker's diary by the CyberMohalla Ensemble, a group of unorthodox proletarian urbanists that Raqs has been in dialogue with over a decade. 

The shadowy presence of a Yaksha and Yakshi – guardians of wealth in Indic mythologies – stands watching over the work, marking time with questions.

Single screen video projection

24 minutes 55 seconds

Sometimes, the finding an antidote to the most basic and lethal form of amnesia, 'the forgetting of air', may require the undertaking of a deep dive. The site of descent is what it's really all about, isn't it? Where and when to dive into the thick of things?

Somewhere in the depths where the Saronic Gulf meets the Aegean Sea, Raqs Media Collective are marking a fragment of an aphorism that has to do with forgetting. The phrase that Raqs inscribes on the sea floor and then films with the help of three divers, sign-posts an interval between the resting place of two shipwrecks; one ancient, another not. Together they might have transported a cargo of all the old and new things that defy memory, had they kept sailing. 

This submarine aide-memoire is as much about what it means to remember to breathe as it is about the forgetting of the fabric of life. It makes for the first underwater artwork made by Raqs Media Collective, and leaves a submarine epiphany in its wake.