• This year’s Art Basel Film Programme, curated by Filipa Ramos, will feature the work of Raqs Media Collective who will be showing a new video work The Bicyclist Who Fell Into A Time Cone (2022) as well as an earlier piece Provisions for Everybody (2018). The screening will take place  at Stadtkino, Basel 14 June 7pm CET.

     

    The Bicyclist Who Fell Into A Time Cone was commissioned by the Jencks Foundation and is on display at The Cosmic House as part of a solo exhibition 1980 in Parallax until 29 December.

     

    Raqs are also participating in the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations led by artists and writers around the world, as part of this project they will be in residence at The Yinka Shonibare Foundation, Ijebu, Nigeria in June,  you can read more here.


    Throughout May their new commission The Waves are Rising, an animated augmented reality wave on a large-scale LED screen, is on display at The Royal Docks, London as part of Sea Change curated by Invisible Dust. Read more about this commission here. 

     

    The film installation Deep Breath (2019/22) is currently on show at Everybody Talks About the Weather at Fondazione Prada, Venice until 26 November. 

  • THE BICYCLIST WHO FELL INTO A TIME CONE, 2023

    THE BICYCLIST WHO FELL INTO A TIME CONE, 2023

    1980 is a year in parenthesis, bracketed like a pause between micro and macro tremors, seismic shifts and around- the corner-upheavals. Raqs Media Collective’s new digital film The Bicyclist Who Fell Into a Parallax Time Cone is an investigation into the optics of this specific sensation of time, which has become second nature for us since 1980. It is a time traveling search into and out of a year - that pause between turbulences - a pause that lurks in every year of what we call our long now. To look at a year that didn't quite break the headlines but was setting the tonality of the ferment of distant storms that would alter the world beyond comprehension, is to pose a question as to how worlds appear, both in proximity and in distance.

     

    In this film, Raqs examine the significance of the year 1980, a pivotal point in the pitch towards a global Post-Modern culture. They probe the connection between 1980 and the present and reconsider what we can learn from it. They explore notions of Post-Modern outside the Western canon, as well as the idea of synchronicity and the relationship between the global and the local, exploring 1980 as a kind of transitory moment.

  • Raqs précis the film: ‘A bicyclist stood still, watching an aeroplane carrying a princeling, the then reigning Prime Minister’s son and heir, spiral down to death from the sky. The bicyclist registered a turn in time, a quickened move along a spiral. Around the same time, Ethernet was making a public appearance, out from the laboratory. Then merely a distant faint imprint of its future, as was the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which too was snaking forward those days. How was this crepuscular time of thresholds and transience registered by the bicyclist? A time that stepped sideways into a zigzag, before rushing on again.’

     

    For Raqs, sensing the pulse of life as it is ordinarily lived in any place resonates in response to events whose ripples may be coursing through the world at the time. Nonetheless, it still holds an awareness of all that which is not-yet-global, of that which is around it. This sensorial doubling-of being alert to things that are and are not-yet- global - is an anticipation of the way in which auditory, retinal and epidermal affects will become transformed in coming decades. Hearing will change, and seeing, and feeling. This misaligned, mis-registered apprehension of far /near and the temporal conjunction of the now/not-yet is what Raqs are conjuring as the ‘parallax’ that tiptoed its entry into our consciousness. A journey into this kind of sensory disjunction allows for the sensation of watching time simultaneously stand still and spiral, outside its habitual limits.

  • Provisions for Everybody, 2018/22

    Provisions for Everybody travels between abandoned coal seams in Northern England and an incomplete bridge in East Champaran, North Bihar, India to mark two cardinal points in the compass of George Orwell's life.

     

    Provisions or Everybody inscribes an eccentric itinerary on and off the trail of George Orwell that accompanies a reading of The Road to Wigan Pier. Traveling between Northern England, Eastern India, Myanmar (Burma) and Catalonia, Raqs pause at Wigan Pier (in England) where Orwell queried the future, at Motihari (in Bihar, India) where he was born in the shadow of an opium godown, on the road from Mandalay where he began to understand the operations of force, in the neighbourhoods of Newcastle and Durham where he investigated coal mining and miners, and in the streets of Barcelona, where he dodged bullets.

     

    En-route, Raqs think about how time gets its names from materials, how we burn and become fuel, and about what can be learnt from pigs, donkeys and a taxidermied elephant. They burrow under the earth, find a memorial to the Buddha’s celebration of doubt next to sugarcane fields, survey an open cast coal mine, consider planetary motion, observe the ghosts of opium and indigo, study line dancing, and find everything ablaze from neolithic times till the present.

     

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  • Deep Breath, 2019/22

     

    Sometimes, the finding of 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 have marked a fragment of an aphorism that has to do with forgetting. The phrase that Raqs inscribes on to 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 art work by Raqs Media Collective, and leaves a submarine epiphany in its wake.

  • Tears (are not only from weeping), 2021

    Tears (are not only from weeping), 2021

    Raqs Media Collective have long been interested in the subversive power of tears, they write: ‘Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, out loud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.’ Tears and laughter contain enough power to threaten constituted authority. When the body is moved, it can speak without words, it cannot be controlled, it is disobedient. If we find something sad or funny, it is very hard to stop our tears or laughter, we become like children.


    Tears are what make us human. We are the only species who cry as the result of an emotional response. The human teardrop is a unique and rare thing to look at up-close. Raqs sought out images of teardrops taken by Norm Barker using an electron microscope, in his photographic pathology laboratory at John Hopkins School of Medicine.  Raqs have animated these images so the salt crystals that you see begin to dance across the screen. Raqs wish to focus our attention on human emotion and ask: ‘If really go up close to a feeling, what do you see?’.

  • Bestiary, 2021

    This series of prints (2021) draws upon historical and popular illustrations of animals to create an array of beasts that range from the mythological to the extinct. The animals are immediately recognisable, yet they are also stylised, filtered through the cultural conventions of a particular place or time. Each animal is accompanied by an ambiguous form that is the image of a human tear, documented through a microscope so that the salt crystals are visible, and embossed with gold foil. By appropriating animal imagery from different cultures, accompanied by a tear laced with precious metal, Bestiary explores what it means to be human in companionship with other forms of life, and our tendency to attribute value or sentiment to animals or use them as characters in moral lessons.

     

  • 'What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we...

    'What if we could fold time in the same way as we can fold a piece of paper? Supposing we could fold it into a boat or an airplane, what kind of voyage would we find ourselves embarking on?'

     

    Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, b.1965, New Delhi, Monica Narula, b. 1969, New Delhi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, b. 1968, New Delhi) have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work is located at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory, often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. Raqs follow their self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce work that demands the viewer look anew at what they take for granted. Myths and histories of diverse provenances, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property inform their diverse oeuvre.

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