Artist Profile :: Raqs Media Collective

21 January 2009

In partnership with Gallery Nature Morte, one of India’s premiere contemporary art spaces since 1997, Phillips de Pury & Company presents The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, featuring 10 of the most influential and soughtafter artists working in India and Pakistan. The exhibition opens in London on 26 November 2008 and in New York on 28 January 2009.

Through 15 December 2008:
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

From 28 January - 14 February 2009:
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street New York NY

New Delhi based artists group Raqs Media Collective, formed in 1991 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, established itself as a collective focused on documentary filmmaking. Joining forces with Ravi Vasudevan and Ravi Sundaram, the group founded the Sarai New Media Initiative in 2001, a space which Raqs utilizes for interdisciplinary creative projects. Their term “Sarai”, derived from caravansarai, finds its roots in Mughal India, referring to an enclosed space in a city or near a main road where travelers can find shelter, food and companionship. A romanticized version of the western truck stop, the sarai was both a destination and departure point and often an environment which fostered conversation and the exchange of ideas. This idea of cross cultural exchange and discourse tied to a specific location is an important concept for Raqs and they have utilized the Sarai New Media center for introducing new concepts in art within India as well a place to explore photography, digital art, graphic design, film and video.

Raqs Media Collective, Brazen (Pittsburgh Torpedo), 2008

The documentary roots of Raqs Media Collective have remained embedded in their work but the group refuses to subscribe to a single denomination or parameters of media, choosing instead to work as critics, curators, writers, artists, filmmakers, publishers, and media practitioners. Their work is closely tied to their lives within New Delhi and according to member Shuddhabrata Sengupta:

"A lot of our work is very rooted in terms of its context in Delhi [...]. In a sense we have always seen our work as responding to the city. So, even if it articulates across large cultural distances we have always seen it as an ongoing process of responding to the locality that we live in..[…]"

"We are constantly looking at the history of the moment in which we are in now. So, how did we come to be this way, in this city? How did the world come to be this way? […] If you look at the walls in Delhi, they have layers and layers of posters and that is one way of looking at the way the present has arisen, to look at it in terms of a torn set of posters that stick on to each other. […] If you think of each city being a particular entity with large footprints, then, these footprints are often sort of merging into each other in global space. And traces travel or infect each other. […] It is not a matter of situating oneself in some kind of abstract ether where everything is floating; it is actually to consider the place you are in with great concreteness and specificity." (Shuddhabratha Sengupta, interview with the author, 17 Dec 2005, New Delhi; “In Dialogue with Raqs Media Collective,” an interview with Raqs Media Collective by Elena Bernardini in Cinema of Prayoga. Experimental Film and Video 1913-2006, ed. Brad Butler and Karen Mizra (London: A no.w.here Publication, 2006))

In The Reserve Army, Raqs Media Collective examines the contemporary implications of the 1950’s commission of two sculptures by the early Modernist Indian sculptor Ram Kinkar Baij for the new building for the Reserve Bank of India. The commission consisted of two monumental figurative sculptures, one of a Yaksha and the other of a Yakshi, flanking the entrance to the bank. In Indian mythology, Yakshas pose difficult questions to unsuspecting wayfarers in order to protect hidden treasures. These statues, positioned outside of the bank at the dawn of the new nation, serve to protect the state’s wealth. Raqs recreates the sculptures on a human scale and frees them from their pedestals, encouraging the question of how today, with such perforated borders and such varied reservoirs for wealth, money is to be guarded and to what aim?

The three members of the Raqs Media Collective live and work in New Delhi, India. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com