Talks

RAQS Media Collective

Between 2 Triennales are 1000 Days

9 October 2020 18:0019:30
Online
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The talk will be arguing for a rethinking of the temporal understanding of events like a Triennale or a Biennale, and proposes that a deliberative mode be situated and worked on to a sensibilities that is not limited by the hold of the exhibitionary aspects of an event.

Raqs Media Collective (formed 1992 by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) argues for a mode of ‘kinetic contemplation’ that rides a restless entanglement with the world. This translates into working with moving images in a way that unsettles ways of ordering space and time through timelines, life-lines, latitudes and longitudes. In the recent “31 Days”, (Video, calligraphy, text, 2020), for example, Raqs takes the predicament of quarantine and seclusion caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic to offer a meditation on a restless world in a quiet time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica and curation.intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry.

The members of Raqs Media Collective live and work in Delhi, India. In 2001, they co-founded the Sarai program at CSDS New Delhi and ran it for a decade, where they also edited the Sarai Reader series. They have exhibited extensively, as well as curated numerous exhibitions, including the Shanghai Biennale 2016, “Why Not Ask Again?”. They are the Artistic Directors for the ongoing Yokohama Triennale 2020, “Afterglow”, where they have developed sources around toxicity, care, and luminosity of friendship with artists, and publics.