September 2023

Raqs Media Collective

Portrait of Raqs Media Collective by Vicky Roy

Shristi Sainani speaks with Raqs Media Collective founders Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi about the group’s longstanding artistic practice and recent exhibitions.

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Jeebesh Bagchi after they graduated from the AJK Mass Communication and Research Center, Jamia Milia University in Delhi. The Collective follows its self-declared imperative of “kinetic contemplation” to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and exacting in its procedures. 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.

What were your first memories of art? Is there a specific moment you look back to when you, as a collective, knew you had found your calling?

Jeebesh Bagchi: One might say there are two broad axes to the formation of the collective. One was around cinema. We hung out around all kinds of cinema spaces, whether it was visiting film festivals or being around documentary filmmakers. At that time, the Shakuntalam cinema-hall in Pragati Maidan was a small and dynamic place to watch world art house cinema. We were avid students of film and were part of the documentary milieu. We saw it as a space that was discursive and alive, full of energy! There was no internal or external to this circuit in the sense that you could put forth a documentary, and everybody in the milieu would come to see it. It was a welcoming space.

The second is art. We visited a lot of exhibitions, attended talks, and wrote on art, publishing in the Indian Express, the Pioneer, the Economic Times, and so on. In the early and mid-90s, art was thriving. It was a political time; the world was transforming with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War. Around us, there was the euphoria and confusion of globalization, an intensification of strife, and a multiplication of claims. Art seemed experimental, turning with new concerns and materials. There were renewed discussions around the status of the image. We see our formation as growing from the cinematic/documentary, with other trajectories and mediums as extensions. Cinema was always the refuge.

Monica Narula: The calling to “make art” came later. Around the late 90s, we started reimagining our relationship with the image. We did extensive research on the history of cinematography, talking to many cinematographers and how they would see painting or read photography. They made us think about various kinds of practices around us. I suppose that is when we realized our inclination towards the sphere of contemporary art. We saw the transformation as part of a larger rubric that went beyond our admittance into “Contemporary Art”; instead, we wanted to claim a space of contemporary art from our location. We saw ourselves as media practitioners. We liked the multiplicity; it allowed us to experiment with a sort of “larger publicness.” There was no one specific moment to “becoming artists.” It was more a recognition of values that gave rise to confidence, which then transformed into a claim.

Throughout your practice, have there been recurring references? Are there paradigms, procedures, pieces of literature, images, or scapes that you revisit from time to time?

Monica Narula: For us, one focus has been on what constitutes dispositions. It’s not only what you do; rather, it is a constant attempt to be aware of how you are doing things. This leaks into everything you do—for example, the question of a non-hierarchical, non-rivalrous approach—one of those dispositional questions. What are the ways that one can find to make it into an underpainting, an effective process for all concerned, and the politics inherent in that. This transformed over time into our thinking on sources of knowledge and procedures for building cognitive and affective relationships between materials, subjectivities, and works.

Jeebesh Bagchi: One question that stayed with us and has proven to continue getting exponentially more complex is that of time. The 90s had posed the scrambling of time in ideas of development, progress, or modernity. During the early 90s, as very young people, we examined and re-examined what progress could even mean. We have, from then, been unpacking the visibility and linearity of time. For instance, in our work, The Coordinates of Everyday Life, presented during Documenta 11 (2002), there is a log of our city, New Delhi. For a year, we drew in the incremental, episodic, and disjointed textures of the city in video and sound. We needed to understand how this city has been shaped in the last one hundred years. There was a multiplicity in the work, exploring themes of law, location, power, and history through the modes of filmmaking, installation, and critical research. On-site, the question was how do you take multiple time sequences and then interlock them with each other? What kind of stories can we manifest, and what kind of possible readings?

Film still, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone, 1980 in Parallax, The Cosmic House, presented by the Jencks Foundation, London, April 4 — December 22, 2023

Your recent exhibition, 1980 in Parallax, at The Cosmic House (London), presented by the Jencks Foundation, runs from the 4th of April to the 22nd of December 2023. What is the significance of 1980 here? Why is it in parallax? Was there a specific impetus that inspired the body of work presented?

Monica Narula: The order of invitation is always an interesting point of consideration. The Cosmic House is a domestic house-made, quite rhetorically, by the architect and theorist Charles James. It was built between 1978 and 1983. The Jencks Foundation invited us to look at this moment in time, and they turned to us precisely because of what we’ve just been talking about—our long deliberation on the constructs of time and the experience of the duration of time. We called the exhibition 1980 in parallax. Parallax implies that when the same thing is looked at from different perspectives, from different positions, a slight shift is seen because the angle of view changes. We decided to examine how one looks at a point in space and what that does to how one looks at a moment in time.

The exhibition includes a new film, augmented reality figures in the house, as well as digital frescos in the exhibition space. The AR figures are topological structures, spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation. They seem to grow, explode, and hover, transforming the domestic into a palimpsest. The film is titled The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone, we call it a chronogram that draws a line through 1980 and delves into that year to uncoil multiple times and worlds. It is a poetic reflection on perceptions of a particular moment in history while interrogating geographies of perceived peripheries. Things you take as assumptions of time or space—because of how language is used to formulate certain concepts—may be far more convoluted.

And let me add that topology might sound complicated, but it is extremely easy to understand. A common example is a Möbius strip. Take a strip of paper, twist it, and stick the ends together. You can go on one side and then on the other side. You never fall off.

Film trailer, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone, 1980 in Parallax, The Cosmic House, presented by the Jencks Foundation, London, April 4 — December 22, 2023

Installation view, 1980 in Parallax, The Cosmic House, presented by the Jencks Foundation, London, April 19—December 22, 2023

In 2021, Raqs presented Laughter of Tears at Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany). You’ve spoken about it as a conglomeration of conversations, a gathering of stories, which speaks of multitudes while also highlighting a strong sense of contrast with underlying mentions of individuality. To quote Sengupta, “Those by which we think of as representing us, are also us…Who is the sovereign?” As part of the presentation, there is a shamiana (ceremonial tent), markings of salt on the floor, drawn texts, and an experiential red glow. What dictates your inclination towards certain material traces or selected narratives?

Monica Narula: The Laughter of Tears came from an intense experience. 2019 and 2020 were a time of the pandemic, but they were also politically charged times in Delhi. There were long-term protests against CAA and the farm laws. COVID created its own dilated moment where you were bound behind screens but with virtual connectedness.

We are all accustomed to shamianas; we have sat under one when attending a wedding, festival, or protest. It is not meant to be permanent but creates a form of connectivity, a temporary community in gathering. By bringing an acknowledgment and awareness of the shamiana, we link the present to the precarity of those intense times and experiences.

In all our lives and different parts of the world, laughter is a consequence of a ridiculous happenstance. But sometimes, it is also the result of ridiculous minor tragedies. At times, you can do nothing but laugh; tears will no longer help. But one yearns for true laughter, that joy. Laughter is an essential part of everything. We wanted to bring in this simultaneity of temporalities and feelings where something is tragic, but laughter is the way to survive it, where permanence is built on temporary things. The repercussions of these are long-lasting. The shamiana was our companion and metaphor.

Jeebesh Bagchi: Speaking of material trace, the salt marking on the floor is from a once-upon-a-time salt mine, now a toxic dump not too far from where the exhibition was being presented, in Braunschweig, Germany. The sign on the floor is a biohazard sign. Running alongside it, in the next room, was the film The Blood of Stars, a short film shot in the Arctic Circle in Luleå, Sweden, connecting mining, the flows of water, the paths of reindeer, and the fragility of the human body. It is also about the fact that the iron in our blood comes from the body of stars. Intermingling is thus very much a part of our being. And it is also the way we think about our artistic practice and our curatorial practice.

Monica Narula: In the process of any exhibition making, the order of decision-making is crucial. There is a certain kind of effect, feeling, and thought in an exhibition that is meant to be achieved. This was a solo exhibition of our work, the first after the pandemic. Having recently curated the Yokohama Triennale (which opened during the pandemic), we were thinking sustainably about toxicity as a thread in our lives and its especially harsh manifestation in the Indian context through caste. The nuclear waste dumped into a salt mine was a return of the toxic. We have been working with and about salt for decades; many years ago, we made The Philosophy of the Namak Haraam. What is our relationship to that which we hold most revered, and how does one both acknowledge and extend or challenge it?

There is a word, or rather a concept, called anta(h)shira in Bengali. It’s only found in medical dictionaries, which define it as “a feeling that flows under the skin” and which you know because you know. It’s not about cognition in that sense but an integrated connection that you can feel. These connections are also essential in exhibition-making.

Installation view, Laughter in Tears, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, September 18—November 28, 2021

Parallel to The Laughter of Tears, you had a curatorial venture titled Hungry for Time at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria). What was the core propeller behind the show, and some challenges or feats that you would like to share with our readers?

Monica Narula: To start with, it was an invitation from the Academy of Fine Arts. The classic building was about to reopen after a five-year renovation and came with restrictions since it was a heritage site. And, we had in mind plurality in terms of the range of materials and objects that form part of their collection, not just the classically famous works. For us, there was a need to add new character/s and shift the existing dialogue. This was a moment for us to recalibrate the collection and overcome a physical limitation since we could not see the collection in person at the time of conceptualization (still being COVID days). The initial point then had to be asking specific questions from the people who knew the collection to arrive at a point of interest that would permit a re-organizing of both the past and the present (the historical and the contemporary).

We were not only looking at masterworks but also at the anonymous or unnamed parts of the collection. It was a conscious choice to aim for diversity, a more inclusive plurality, and also to maintain access. There was a need for blurry lines and an obliteration of time as constructed by received history. The collection reeked of the idea that you can go anywhere and say, “Oh, I can take over. I can claim this.” And that’s why we decided to call it Hungry for Time. So, this gaze that eats up landscapes is a hunger that also eats up time and denies that there are other timescales and cosmologies. It is a hunger you cannot satisfy.

There were thirty invitations to contemporary artists besides the almost 100 objects from the collection. For the first time, we also include works by us (Raqs) in the exhibition because we see this exhibition as an invitation to epistemic disobedience, where we invite others to come on a journey with us. The very name of the exhibition was Hungry for Time, an invitation to epistemic disobedience with Raqs Media Collective! We adopted methods of working—procedures, we call them—which foregrounded how we look at something rather than simply what we are looking at. Some procedures include retitling historical artwork, changing the immediate environment through luminosity and color of light, breaking visual boundaries with a fogginess, etc.

We also kept some artwork close to you, where you can sit as an audience member. This allowed a new connection or association with viewing. The standard plinth was replaced with yielding foam for the placement of broken plaster casts of slave bodies. These plinths reflected the body’s weight and gave it an actuality so you could feel its presence.

Installation view, Hungry for Time, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, September 10, 2021—February 27, 2022

In 2016, you realized Thicket, a tripartite installation with actions titled Anybody, Everybody, Make a Mark, The Unbroken Reading, and Memorophilia. This was at Tate Modern (London). Please tell us a little more about the conception of the work.

Jeebesh Bagchi: When you are moving through a thicket, you’re moving through neighborhoods, between affinities and antagonisms, familiarities and strangenesses, and with people who are themselves also moving through complex thickets. These thickets nourish us and allow us to navigate them. They are lively. At times, there is a tendency to cut the thicket and move away. The process of shedding involves a certain impatience. Understanding both—navigating thickets and cutting them—allows us to think harder about what we cherish. And as a context, the thicket needs to renew itself. Thickets change to become thin, and thickets become dense.

In our work called the Great Bare Mat, a unique carpet we had woven in Bulgaria in 2012, we drew the digital conversation between three people, i.e., us, in the form of nodes and lines. Each time you emit anything digitally, this is mediated by a thick network of servers, codes, routers, and people. In the pre-internet world, this thicket was experienced differently. We used this drawing to make the carpet design so that you could join in on the conversation by sitting on a drawing of it.

Entering digital thickets, you create new thickets. To enter thickets is to understand you are moving through a density of ideas, provocations, and various kinds of unresolved tensions between worlds. It is intangible, and we try to bring this understanding into and through our practice. In the work at Tate (2016), we portrayed this in a spatial, three-dimensional form by inviting audiences to draw the thicket with blue tape in space. It was an accretive thicket with thousands of interconnected lines of tape.

Monica Narula: It was almost immobilizing because you had to slow down and move through the thicket. Over days, the thicket continued to grow. Your movement became more deliberative, nimble, and open to negotiation; you had to think more. Also, the fact is that when people are building this, you don’t know who’s gone before you, and you don’t know, necessarily, the happenstances that occurred after. It’s a line of conversation between strangers over time.

Installation view, Thicket, Tate Modern, London, December 14—18, 2016

Over time, would you say there are significant shifts an artistic or curatorial trajectory undergoes while navigating different contexts (be that institutional or geographical)?

Jeebesh Bagchi: The question of consideration becomes sharper over time. Some questions seem much more piercing in certain locations, allowing for an intensification or precision. I’ll give an example. We were executing a project in a museum, where there were great numbers in viewership, but the young were missing because the museum was a pedagogic apparatus to them. So, we decided to approach it away from didacticism, expressing this through the way artworks were conjoined and an intricate reworking of the relationship between works and text. Moving through the passages, with a variation in luminosity, there was a gradation of experience. The viewer should be comfortable and relaxed, with a repose to engage with the provocations that artists bring to the world.

Every place suggests a specific question that then changes and charges bodily inquiry—how we look at the history of cultural production—and with each instance, a collective understanding grows.

Installation view, Thicket, Tate Modern, London, December 14—18, 2016

What are you looking towards next? Are there specific projects you are looking forward to realizing in the future?

Jeebesh Bagchi: One project in process in our studio right now is a permanent public sculpture for the Goethe University in Frankfurt, to be placed inside their new building for the School of Linguistics. We won this as part of an invited competition. The sculpture we have proposed is being made with different kinds of LED screens, both hard and malleable. The work will have a relationship to language in terms of what you can see on the screens. There is also an element of dreaming and extension around collective life and its potential for students (though not only) to learn from. We see it as a kind of storytelling to produce the possibility of different signals and images of and for the world.

We usually work in multiple directions on different projects with different scales. There are teaching assignments, and there are works in preparation as well for different locations, including Bangladesh and Dubai. There are two weather station projects, in affiliation with the GAS Foundation, planned through sites in Rajasthan, Sikkim, and different locations in Nigeria. The preliminary work is done, and we’re now in the process of thinking about how to produce, what stance to amplify, and which questions around water and resources to focus on. Climate change discourse, which is integral to the project, is complex and deeply troubling in our highly unequal context.

Work in progress, Weather Stations, 2023, World Weather Network’s climate-conscious initiative, Nigeria and Rajasthan

Raqs Media Collective
1980 in Parallax
The Cosmic House
Presented by the Jencks Foundation
London
April 19—December 22, 2023

Raqs Media Collective
@raqsmediacollective

Monica Narula
@monixa

Jeebesh Bagchi
@jeebeshd

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
@shuddha

Shristi Sainani
@shristi_sainani

Project 88
@project88mumbai

Experimenter
@experimenterkol

Firth Street Gallery
@firthstreetgallery

Shristi Sainani is a curator, designer, researcher, and writer currently based in New Delhi, India, where she functions independently. Her interest lies in dismantling and assessing core concepts of exhibition making, specifically focusing on Contemporary Art churned through the diaspora of the Global South.

She also writes poetry, having published three books in the genre, and has contributed to several art and architectural forums. Her independent research focuses on collections and architecture of private art museums. Shristi’s paper on inclusivity in museum spaces won the INSC Researchers Award in 2021.

Shristi is a formally trained architect. She completed her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney and her Master’s degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Melbourne.