RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE::::
Formed in 1992
Based in Delhi, India

RAQS is a collective of media practitioners (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta) working in art practice, new media, filmmaking, photography, media theory and research, writing, criticism, and curation. members of the collective are resident at the Sarai Media lab, Delhi, where their work converges into projects that interpret the urban experience. Based in Delhi, RAQS media collective pursues a contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the larger world from the streets of Delhi. Yet, in their engagement with modernity RAQS articulates an intimate relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances, exploring intellectual currents of a global society. RAQS sees its work as inducing a series of investigations that straddle dynamic, affective and aesthetic registers, expressing an imaginative unpacking of questions of identity and location, a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property.

A/S/L is a video, text, and sound installation investigating the economy of the virtual labor environment. transcripts of chat sessions constitute an electronic patchwork that also includes real and simulated audio recordings of conversations between call-center workers and their clients, images of a female larynx, the text of a re-worked Upanishadic dialogue, and video recordings of a spoken-english class in Delhi. The work presents the map of the world as a grid of reflecting surfaces marked by shifting inequalities, and the call-center worker as a figure in this mirrored world, demanding a new understanding of the world, of what it means to labor, in a place and across space.

Sightings is an image and text piece taken from RAQS’ essay, “X notes on Practice: stubborn structures and insistent seepage in a networked World.” For this exhibition, it has been reproduced on banners hung on the outer walls of the gallery.

Visit RAQS Media Collective website