[Comments] [Articles]
• “Se l'arte contemporanea riscopre il fascino delle industrie dismesse,” Corriere della Sera, 27 March 2008 • “India Rising,” The Western Mail, 13 March 2008 • “La Bollywood degli artisti,” La Repubblica, 17 October 2007 • “India” looks at local issues with a global eye, Pittsburgh Herald-Tribune, 14 October 2007 • Nancy Adajania, “Nieuwe Lifewerlden, Operationele Contexten,” Metropolis Magazine, December 2007 • Emma Firmin, “The State and the Nation,” DAM Magazine, Brussels, September 2007 • “Pursuits – Backstage with Hou Hanru,” Wall St Journal Europe, 24 August 2007 • Francesco Manacorda, “Whirling Dervishes and Urban Design,” Frieze, June 2007 • “La rinascita delle arti dal post-modern all'eclettico,” La Repubblica, 28 May 2007 • “Made in India,” India Today, 18 December 2006
• Jane Rankin Reid, “Questions Rarely Asked, or Seen,” Tehelka, August, 2006
• “Indian viewing in Venice,” Business Standard, June 15, 2005 • “Asian artists making impact,” Business Times Singapore, 10 June 2005 • “Towards New Horizons: Some New Vistas Await Indian Art in Venice,” The Hindu, June 3, 2005 • “India Returns to the Venice Biennale,” Art Asia Pacific, Summer 2005 Issue #45 • “The Collective Interrogators: second innings for Raqs Media Collective at Venice Biennale,” Indian Express, August 25, 2005 • “Designing a Museum Exhibition,” Los Angeles Weekly • P.C. Smith, “Raqs Media Collective at Bose Pacia,” Art in America, May, 2005 “Raqs Media Collective,” The New York Times, 10 December 2004 • “Taipei Biennial brings stars of art to Taiwan,” Taipei Times, 24 September 2004 • “Globaliseren of lokaliseren,” De Financieel Economische Tijd, 23 April 2003 More Selected Articles • Indian Art for Indians, Lucian Harris, Art Newspaper, June 2007 • The Visceral City and the State of Fear, Ravi Sundaram, AD Magazine, 2007 • Puzzling the World, Cedric Vincent, The K.D. Vyas Correspondence, Vol.1, Revolver Books, Frankfurt, 2006 • New Media: The Change in Plan, by Charuvi Agarwal, Matters of Art, August 2006 http://www.mattersofart.com/exrevfull.htm • New Media Art, Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, Taschen Basic Art Series, 2006 • Anthology of Art, Edited by Jochen Gerz, Article by Steve Dietz http://www.yproductions.com/writing/archives/000746.html • Citizens: Artists Go Beyond Borders at the City Gallery http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/leicester/news/ART27879.html • New Media Culture in India: A Visit to Sarai: The New Media Initiative, Geert Lovink, Fine Art Forum Vol.16, Issue 12 December 2002 http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/Backissues/Vol_16/faf_v16_n12/reviews/lovink.html • Travelling at the speed of life: World Time and Global Politics in New Media by Anna Munster, posted on Fibreculture, 16 December 2002 http://www.fibreculture.org • Net Culture: Between the Fast Lane and the Slow, Nancy Adajania, Art India. Volume (7), No.1, 2002 • Global Art: of Catastrophes, Redemptive gestures, Ranjit Hoskote, The Hindu, November 24, 2002 http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2002/11/24/stories/2002112400420100.htm • Okwui Enwezor, artistic director Documenta 11, in an interview with Tom Griffin, in Art Press 280, June 2002 • Emoting in a Cold Digital World by Paulo Rebêlo, in Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54346,00.html |
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“A Meditation on Locality and Everyday Life at the Urban Margins, Cartography as Power and Communication as Resistance” "...Consider, also, the inter-media installation produced by the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective: a meditation on locality and everyday life at the urban margin, cartography as power and communication as resistance, it attempts to breach the various walls separating the formal exhibition space from the public space of the street, natural-born citizen from migrant labourer, artist from technologist, developed world from developing world... Such art-works represent a dramatic prospect for the global art of the 21st Century: their logic and trajectory may be conditioned by the contexts of their origin, but they offer a vivid take on the globalised contemporary reality, not splenetic but optimistic. They bear a visceral relationship to the hopes and terrors of the subaltern and the marginalised everywhere - whether in those former Third-World sites of ethnic otherness, supposedly "mired in history" according to Fukuyamist mythology, or in the world's global metropolitan centres, which have woken up to the alien, immigrant and disempowered within themselves. Far from being peripheral elsewheres, regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia will soon have to be acknowledged as dynamic centres, as situations from which artists of impressive energy and protean inventiveness have emerged, their redemptive gestures creating resolute, if small and temporary Utopias against the pervasive catastrophe of the present. "...We need to consider works such as these within the context of a three way relation or what we might call a socio-technical-ethical assemblage" It is important then to locate 'Location(n)' itself - not within the nation or even place 'India' nor as manifestation of as aesthetic that might be generalised through the direction - 'Indian new media art' - as such. To do either would be to presume the operation of an aesthetics grounded only in a politics of identity, manifesting some essential quality or basis of otherness. Rather we need to consider works such as these within the context of a three way relation or what we might call a socio-technical-ethical assemblage that pays attention to first, the specific time zone relation the Indian IT economy holds to globally networked information flows. Second, the asynchronous development of electronic cultures within India. These, Ravi Sundaram has argued, work via a model of recyclying, producing an alternative experience of the now or modernity, outside of both national/state regulation and irreducible to western, global sensibilities such as postmodernism (Sundaram, 1999). Third, we need to consider the cultural work done by groups and organizations such as Raqs Media Collective and the Sarai New Media Initiative to produce an alternatively positioned public domain through the global deployment of new media technologies against standardisation - such as the standardisation of time. This three way relation at once situates the new media art work coming out of Dehli... and catapults it onto the global arena, making time-ontological, durational, historical times - the arena of conflict and contestation. While I am not claiming that work such as 'Location(n)'... (carries) the weight and force of political transformation, I do want to suggest that their differential interventions into the speeds of electronic life provide us with a resource for what Appardurai has called: 'self-imagining as an everyday social project' (Appadurai, 1997: 4). "Turning the Focus from Individual to Collective Art Production" ...Among the Indian participants, the focus was essentially on displacement and territoriality. The Raqs Collective from Delhi, like other group participants from other parts of the world, turned the focus from individual to collective art production and issues. Raqs' installation invited responses to the multiple, frequently conflicting efforts to "control" city spaces in Delhi. It found an echo in David Goldblatt's photographs of areas of contested control in South Africa... The CNN Documenta The vast show has more than its share of visual and conceptual excellence, including Feng Mengbo's shooting-gallery computer game, Mona Hatoum's electrified room installation, Jeff Wall's Ralph Ellison-inspired lightbulb-bedecked lightbox image, Alfredo Jaar's Lament of the Images (with three glowing texts about withheld images and a blindingly bright blank screen), and David Small's interactive virtual book. There are powerful works by the Atlas Group, among whose archival conceits is an inventory of car bombs (make, model, and color) exploded in Beirut during the Lebanese wars; by Raqs Media Collective, which delineates the dispossession of urban space in New Delhi; and by Multiplicity, whose ID: Journey Through a Solid Sea exposes the Italian cover-up of a shipwreck of immigrants. "The Reality of One Space Carried by the Inequality of Another" ...In it's video and text installation A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location) Raqs Media Collective uses the example of Indian female tele workers to look at sex specific working conditions within the externalized online data industry. The working conditions of this new "digital proletariat" necessitate constantly switching between the online and offline world, between each cultural and economic situation. The reality of one space is carried by the inequality of another... 'Adaptations' "A Fine Solo Debut" A fine solo debut in New York...Raqs Media Collective (has) radically expanded the conventional definition of Indian Art... "Icon- The most enticing exhibition at the Venice Biennale" In Giudecca, again, a sign reading "Icon" leads me to the exhibition of Indian contemporary art. It is, by far, the most enticing collection at the Biennale. |