The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta to explore urban geography, epistemology and creativity through emerging media technologies. While producing a series of experimental documentary films and television programs, they began to embrace the potential of the Internet and the questions it posed around the dissemination of knowledge. In 2000, they helped found Sarai, a New Delhi-based research centre and archive dedicated to critical discussion on urban experience; their practice further diversified through increasing contact with art production, lending a strong poetic element to their already speculative projects. In addition to film, installation and online projects, their work involves writing, publishing and teaching, and they have assumed curatorial roles for a number of exhibitions, including a component of ‘Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art’ in 2008. The collective’s name is equally multifaceted: in Farsi, Arabic and Urdu, ‘raqs’ describes the ecstatic state entered by whirling dervishes; it could simply refer to dance or be an acronym for ‘rarely asked questions’. All are appropriate to the unusual mixture of drift and urgency that characterises the trio’s investigations of collective space and the passage of time. Professional categories tend to confer certain restrictions on fields of study and modes of expression: limitations on employable prose styles, for example, or conditions attached to shifts between the verbal and the visual, the spatial and sensual. Their shifts in tone of voice or modes of address — as artists, curators, educators, philosophers — are undertaken with attention to the requirements of the idea, and the discursive possibilities that a given social and material realisation might contribute to it. Raqs Media Collective’s project for the 20-Year Archive is a satellite presentation of a larger exhibition by the group, curated by them for the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, satellite city of the Raqs’s native Delhi. That exhibition, titled ‘Sarai Reader 09’, mimics the freewheeling style of the collective itself. Sarai Reader is the name of an annual series of publications produced by the Sarai program, which operates under the aegis of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Accordingly, the exhibition’s model could be described as textual, in that it emulates the experience of reading — a narrative unfolding over time whose interpretation is tightly mediated by the reader’s faculties. The unfolding is effected through a sequence of ‘episodes’, while the reader’s proximity to the page is emulated by an open call for proposals — requested through Raqs’ expansive (and typically interdisciplinary) network — for projects to be included within the body of the exhibition itself, so that the audience can potentially participate as artists. The organisation of material at the Devi is therefore in a state of constant evolution as objects and installations are rearranged, while the space is animated by regular workshops, performances, talks, screenings and music. The assembly of a book — Sarai Reader 09 — will also take place during the course of the Sarai Reader exhibition. In the 20-Year Archive, Sarai Reader 09: The Satellite 2012 is a portal into the Gurgaon exhibition, and at the same time an extension of the project. Laid out like an active workspace, The Satellite presents a selection of sound and video works and artist interviews from Sarai projects. These are complemented with around 100 project proposals available for perusal, and a number of copies of the book PTO — also produced for the event — as a retrospective of Sarai projects since 2000. This focus on proposals is wholly appropriate to the idiosyncratic, sometimes counter-intuitive, histories archives construct. Archives effectively collapse time into a given area of space, where it lies in wait for researchers to unfold at a later date. Proposals, though oriented toward to the future, offer glimpses of the time in which they were composed, and the material equipment and creative imaginings that accompanied such organisation of ideas into concrete plans. They are histories of past desires and possible futures, passageways between those moments we subjectively label past, present and future, depending on how far we have moved along the trajectory of our lifetimes. Just as logistics and telecommunications can collapse the space between two geographically distant galleries, distinct temporalities can be united momentarily by the printed word, the record of a thought at the moment it was compelled to action. Reuben Keehan RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE Time satellite 263