The Raqs Media Collective’s solo show at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) takes the form of an extended conversation around the concepts of time and the untimely which run through much of the collective’s past and present work, and acts as a working laboratory of the ideas that the practice of the Raqs collective is considering today, as it faces the future.
With more than fifty works in a range of media - video, installations, mixed media assemblages, sound, photography, print and sculpture - Raqs turns Jaipur House, the original home of the NGMA, into a magical, labyrinthine container of stories, riddles, enigmas and possibilities.
This is kind of art making that is quirky, intensely intellectual, humorous, poetic as well as committed to the asking of tough questions in a turbulent world. The collective’s sustained history of more than twenty years of working and thinking together is reflected in this multi-layered exhibition which twists and turns the way we think about time, finds lost constellations in the sky, argues with the epics, asks questions about the meaning of value, strikes back at time, thinks about war, reflects on the urban condition, considers the laboring body and addresses the future of a four year old child.
The Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) has been highly visible on the International art scene for the last decade. They enjoy playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.
Where: National Gallery of Modern Art When: On till February 8
With more than fifty works in a range of media - video, installations, mixed media assemblages, sound, photography, print and sculpture - Raqs turns Jaipur House, the original home of the NGMA, into a magical, labyrinthine container of stories, riddles, enigmas and possibilities.
This is kind of art making that is quirky, intensely intellectual, humorous, poetic as well as committed to the asking of tough questions in a turbulent world. The collective’s sustained history of more than twenty years of working and thinking together is reflected in this multi-layered exhibition which twists and turns the way we think about time, finds lost constellations in the sky, argues with the epics, asks questions about the meaning of value, strikes back at time, thinks about war, reflects on the urban condition, considers the laboring body and addresses the future of a four year old child.
The Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) has been highly visible on the International art scene for the last decade. They enjoy playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.
Where: National Gallery of Modern Art When: On till February 8