The Letter
Never Posted

Another Letter on Declining Time

Installation with Video, Sound, Sculpture, Narrative

The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol. 1 is an installation embodying an epistolary enigma. The basis of this work are a set of eighteen 'letters' between Raqs and a person or entity who is identified as KD Vyas, sometime redactor of the Mahabharata. The Installation manifesting the 'Correspondence' brings together eighteen video enigmas that could be an abbreviated contemporary concordance to the eighteen cantos of the Mahabharata, densely encrypted messages, annotations to the letters themselves, or memories of places and times where they may have been read - once, twice or an infinite number of times. The work involves video, sound, a dossier and a dialogue with the architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller that results in a structure 'The Node House' that holds the images and sounds, hovering like the disembodied memory of an instance of the epic's hyperlinked incantation.

The eighteen floating fragments that constitute the installation function as indices of Raqs' continuing investigations on the theme of 'declining time', on the protocols of the production and transmission of narratives, on the vexed questions of the verification and authenticity of being, and on some methods for remaining sane in the early years of the twenty first century.

The titles of the fragments are:

The Letter found in the Dead Letter Office
The Letter Made Heavy by Regret
The Letter Apprehending Disclosure
The Letter of the Fugitive
The Letter Never Posted
The Letter Dispatched in Haste
Another Letter on Declining Time
The Letter of Verification and Authenticity
The Letter of Disavowal
The Letter of Things Lost and Found
The Letter of Estimates and Accounts
The Letter of Disguise and Longing
The Letter Incriminating the Reader
The Letter of Continued Bewilderment
The Letter of the Haunted Warrior
The Letter of Bitter Peacetime
The Letter Made Brittle by Repeated Reading
The Letter Forsaking All Claims

Shown at:
Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, Schaumainkai 53, 60596 Frankfurt, www.museumsstiftung.de
(Installation images courtesy Norbert Thigulety)
Curated by Monique Behr, 20th September - 15 October 2006

CATALOG: “Raqs Media Collective. The KD Vyas Correspondence: Vol. 1”

Ed. by Monique Behr, with a foreword by Monique Behr and contributions by Raqs Media Collective, Cédric Vincent and Nikolaus Hirsch / Michel Müller. German/English, 52 pages, Video Stills, Revolver Books, Frankfurt
ISBN-3-86588-312-5