RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Nerves (2018)
Chromachron 2000-2024 (2024)
‘Escapement’ (2008)
Be-Taal/ बे-ताल (2023)
Night & Day, Day and Night / रात और दिन, दिन और रात (2014)

Liminal Gaps, NMACC
Mumbai, India
31st March, 2024 - 9th June, 2024

CURATION AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION BY TRIADIC

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Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi (b.1965, New Delhi), Monica Narula (b. 1969, New Delhi) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968, New Delhi). Their work is located at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory.

For Liminal Gaps, Raqs presents five works that are meditations on time, exploring narratives of the past, present and future, or as they say the yesternow and the presentomorrow:

Nerves (1) is a large-scale mural work that can be found enveloping the staircases of the Art House. The ‘blue skin’ is layered with dancing neurons, drawn from early 20th Century medical investigations. Alongside are an array of expressions - ‘hit a raw nerve’, ‘what a nerve’, ‘a war of nerves’, ‘nerves of steel’ etc - phrases that we use every day to speak of capacity and endurance subtracted from the crucial word ‘nerve’. This gesture builds a poetic incompleteness from an abstract, almost code-like pattern that viewers can attempt to decipher. This work acts as the underbelly and passageway from one artist’s space to another.

Chromacron (2) is a painted wall work in which each pantone strip represents the colour of a specific year, dating from 2000 - 2024. The pantone for each year is allocated through the analysis of socio-cultural factors & data, as well as seasonal trends. What is left is a capsule of experienced and imagined moods of the time. This corridor is, quite literally, a passage of time.

Escapement (3) is a collection of twenty-seven almost identical clocks, each allocated to a city (Baghdad, Delhi, Tokyo, Johannesburg etc), with the hands set to their respective time zones. Three clocks tagged to three imaginary cities – Babel, Shangri La and Macondo – run backwards mirroring real time. In a twist, the clock faces are marked with emotions rather than hours, underlining the fragile functions of our daily lives. Escapement is a horological, or clockmaking term. It denotes the mechanism in watches and clocks that governs the regular motion of the hands.

Be-Taal/ बे-ताल (4) is an Augmented Reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be experienced through iPads located inside the central oval space. This work brings to question what is real in our tactile world, versus what exists in a digital reality. In many Indic languages, there are intangible beings who exist between the moments of our time; they are called ‘betaal’. The ‘betaal’, a figure familiar from popular story cycles, is perceived by Raqs as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness, as the very word means “off-time”. Inspired by its namesake, Be-Taal are augmented reality forms, appearing and disappearing from vision depending on the devices that render them alive.  

Night & Day, Day and Night / रात और दिन, दिन और रात (5) is a 24 hour clock where the usual digits are displaced with words in the Devanagri script relating to varying scales of time. Words such as pran (life), tithi (date), ritu (season), express various notions of time. According to the artists, time is experienced at one instance at its briefest - shran (second), while at another it can open us to an eternity (kala) in it , or bring us back to a definite period as yug (century). In the quest to have ourselves be read by time, this counting device invites us to stand and be immersed within its counting; to sit, to wait, to stray, and to play with its meanings. The clock, like all things symbolic, remains open to interpretative moves.