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ART IN REVIEW; Raqs Media Collective New York Times, December 10, 2004, Friday Bose Pacia Some of more interesting art today isn't likely to end up in museums, because it doesn't act like art, at least as the market persists in defining the term. It isn't crateable and saleable. It isn't by the singular artist-artisan. It doesn't have a style or a ''look.'' Instead, it is often collaborative and multidisciplinary. Its beauty lies, as old-style Conceptualism's did, in information and ideas that are also metaphors, but also in a pleasure in technology that may be a generational development. Raqs Media Collective, based in New Delhi, makes art like this. The collective's core members -- Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta -- work simultaneously in several media, including photography, film, publishing and the Internet. Their projects involve collaborations with many other artists, as well as with contributors for whom the term artist is restrictive or irrelevant . For Bose Pacia's traditional gallery space, Raqs has made work in traditional forms, in a New York solo debut that takes the instability of location as its theme. One photo-collage deals with the transitory condition of airport travelers; another with the shadowy figures of ''missing persons;'' yet another with an Anglophile Indian man who paid a visit to Europe only to be denied entry. The welcoming land of his expectations didn't exist. While the individual pieces make sense on their own, they are most effective taken as parts of a conceptual whole. To get the full Raqs experience, though, it's necessary to check out their journal, ''Sarai,'' their Internet work and their public projects in India and elsewhere. The word raqs means dance, which is what these artists are doing as they dart among cultures and media, finding new partners and patterns as they go. And the word specifically refers to the whirling dance of the Sufi dervish, which no definition of dance that I know really encompasses. |
Raqs Media Collective at Bose Pacia Art in America The works at Bose Pacia countered vague "terrorist" fears with specific observations. One 5-by-6-foot piece combines text with color photos of airport terminals. The graphic elements are behind chicken-wire fencing and lit from the top by a glaring, naked fluorescent tube. The text narrates an encounter with a person who is trapped, living in an airport transit lounge without legal status for entry. On another wall, two 4-foot-square transparencies contain text and images from Indian newspapers and are backlit by multiple tubes that switch on and off in horizontal patterns. They are dominated by classified ads: missing person searches, compact disc replication, name-change announcements and other intimations of a world of phantom insubstantiality. Another work, this time on vellum, is covered with blueprints of roads and lots and hangs loosely in a box frame. The blueprints are interspersed with photographs of details of modern buildings, shipping containers and highways. The imagery suggests some kind of newly fabricated community (and perhaps a plot against it). At the end of the gallery, a video projection showed a middle-aged South Asian man performing in front of a wall of shelves that holds neatly folded clothes, masks and a bowler hat. (In an accompanying catalogue text, Raqs identifies Magritte's man in a bowler hat with Fantomas, a popular character from an early-20th-century French crime novel series. They also relate the idealized, faceless symmetry of the man in the hat to the strictures of passport photos.) The man in the video changes in and out of the costumes around him, sometimes gesticulating militantly toward the viewer, sometimes looking fat and ridiculous in his underwear, sometimes climbing the shelves (as a route of escape?). His unending non-narrative activity becomes tiring, but effectively evokes the Kafkaesque frustrations that might face the immigrant. The gallery's small back room contained only a framed facsimile of a letter written in 1837 by Ramohan Roy, a Europhile reformist. He protests the routine denial of his visa application to visit Paris. His quixotic, idealist appeal for justice contrasts sharply with the rest of the exhibition, in which justice does not seem to be expected. Raqs's transformation of appropriated visual materials through framing and assemblage sometimes seems perfunctory. By contrast, their texts are highly wrought. In the end, Raqs's thoughtfully assembled themes across multiple mediums add up to a resonant installation. COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc. |
“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. |
New Media Culture in India: A Visit to Sarai, The New Media Initiative Travelling at the speed of life: World Time and Global Politics in New Media Net Culture: Between the Fast Lane and the Slow Global Art: of Catastrophes, Redemptive gestures Diatribe or Art? An Overview of Documenta 11 Art in an International State of Emergency: The CNN Documentary Emoting in a Cold Digital World Indian viewing in Venice Towards New Horizons: Some New Vistas Await Indian Art in Venice India Returns to the Venice Biennale The Collective Interrogators: Second innings for Raqs Media Collective at Venice Biennale Visions From Nigeria and India and a Van Searching for Utopia New Media Art Anthology of Art Citizens - Artists Go Beyond Borders at the City Gallery Designing a Museum Exhibition Raqs Media Collective at Bose Pacia |