Raqs Media Collective’s retrospective show at NGMA will have some thought-provoking works by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Bagchi talks to Karan Bhardwaj about the use of text in their artworks
To defy the conventional norms of contemporary art, three artists — Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta got together to launch Raqs Media Collective in early 90s, a group that reshaped Indian art forever. Having spent two decades in the industry, they have showcased and curated works at major international platforms like Centre Pompidou (Paris), Art Unlimited (Basel). In a rare restrospective, they will be putting together some of the most thought-provoking art at Jaipur House, National Gallery of Modern Art.
What are the key highlights of the exhibitionIJ
We do not see Untimely Calendar as a retrospective exhibition. We see it more as a series of prospective directions that our work has taken, a way of looking into the future, that is also the present. The key axis of much of the work showing is around time, and its limits. And to figure out a way of moving towards an experience and definition of time that is polyphonic and not oppressed by progressive linear time. It is going to playfully engage with the multiplicity of time. There are works from our travels to many parts of the world — Shanghai, Gwangju and Pittsburgh. The show is punctuated by different ways of reading other states of being and also experiences. We use a diverse range of materials like videos, drawings, animations, image text reading, sculpture and even trees.
How did you select the artworksIJ
There are about 40-45 artworks. We have already had a couple of big solo shows this year and we have been in dialogue with curators about our work for some time now. For this show, we decided to curate ourselves but we engaged to have a dialogue with Delhi-based artist Vishal Dar in terms of directions of how to place our work. Our main line of concern was getting into diversity and threading our practices. Another concern has been to show a density of work, especially around photographs and archives. A work called Five Pieces of Evidence takes as a starting point what newspapers were telling us everyday for a few days some years ago and the city was overwhelmed by the ‘Monkey Man’. The show is accompanied by a book edited by Shveta Sharda and it is interestingly been crafted from our writings, notes, images, archives, dialogues and letters. She has done a curatorial work and culled from such a wide range of material as well as dialogues that we continue to have with each other and others outside the collective. The book will present multiple edges of our practice in contemporary times.
What are the most striking exhibitsIJ
There is a clock called Night Day, Day Night which is a 24-hour clock and the clock has 24 different ways in which time is called upon in our life. It is written in Devnagri and the idea is to depict different experiences of time. We have brought them together to give a sense of richness of possible ways of looking at time that may be part of our life but we do not recognise or pay attention to it. The KD Vyas Correspondence Vol 1 was produced in 2006. It is a series of letters exchanged between a figure called KD Vyas and us and the fact is that KD Vyas is also Krishna Dvaipan Vyas and the redactor of the Mahabharata. Rerun (2013) is inspired by Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photo of a run on a bank in Shanghai in 1948. We have re-enacted it with 48 actors (exactly the same number of people) in an echo of the original (and actually shot it in Shanghai Film City) and now its a photograph that moves, and moves us.
Your works have been futuristic, modern and defy the conventional forms of art. What drives your imaginationIJ
I think is one of the most interesting time in our history is the present. The last 10-15 years has seen huge shifts in the world. It is, therefore, also the time to think a lot and ask questions and be playful. That is what we try to do because we are all part of this fabric.
How has global exposure influenced your workIJ
We have engaged with many international curators, artists, writers and thinkers. Art is a kind of matrix that goes through all kinds of territories. For example, a really interesting art event is now beginning to happen in Dhaka, so this matrix is truly global. What we would say is that it is important to pose questions to yourself in your practice — no matter which location you are in — and then you will find multiple circuits that will call to you, and the international, is one of them. The idea of travel can definitely make you alert to many of your own concerns. Travel makes for a more interesting eye to look around at the world you are living in. What is more proximate and very close to you becomes sharper, more detailed and get more texture through your travel and communication.
The three of you have been together for over 20 years. How do you handle creative clashesIJ
We enjoy creative clashes. As Monica would say, the differences may drive us like an engine but something we really build on is trust. The trust is to chisel out something very unknown to all three of us. Between us what emerges is unexpected to us; sometimes we recognise it and sometimes we don’t. So this unknowability drives us.
Tell us about the works that talk about capitalism.
We are showing Five Pieces of Evidence but we are remodelling it a bit. We are also showing The Capital of Accumulation. It is a work about the 20th century which is an era of Capital with all its possibilities — its violence, its coherence and its confusion. We have tried to think the landscape of time with its material history and through creating a protagonist to help us get a view on what envelopes us, what is moving around us and what truly is the work of capitalism.
How do you weave human emotions with timeIJ
We try to make devices about time that can tell us different stories about time. Our ‘emotion clocks’ are basically devices we arrange in combinations to make us sense, feel and experience time through other ways than the dominant one in which time is told. Time is grand. We would like to move away from this grandeur idea of time to a more textured, truthful, destructive, mobile, unexplained time where the past, present and future do not move in the same linear, separated way. Time can be an acrobat.
We have a work called lost Constellations which is about constellations pictured into the star sky; people have imagined reindeers and three-headed dogs and harvest gods up there. Pictures are drawn through the telescope into the sky. The piece is an installation which is a device to ask the question: Can I see other things, other desires in the skyIJ Am I a part of this worldIJ
Share details of this installation inspired by Devnagri script.
It’s a 24-hour clock (unlike the usual 12-hour face that we usually see) that writes words of time for hours. It encompasses from micro experience to cosmic time, time of rupture to time of ripening.
These words are written in the Devnagri script and drawn from words and concepts that we all know. let me ask you to think the word: lifetime. It is filled with infinite experiences and yet it is such a finite word. The idea behind this clock is to push our thinking about time to a sense of infinity, vastness and yet it should feel very intimate.
Your works are text heavy.
For us, text is material. After all, we are all surrounded by text. For us it has as much value as images, because it also comes to us as image so often. We try to mould and play with it. In Correction to the First Draft of History, we have used blackboard paint on newspaper so that one can rewrite on it through texts and image. What is a textIJ What is the marking of a textIJ What is there inside a textIJ Our interest is to feel the materiality of text, what text exactly does. We are equally concerned as to which font is used and how we name our work. We also work with simple words and objects, sometimes, where we place a word in relation to an object and change the way the object will be read.
What are your forthcoming projectsIJ
We are doing a few big shows — a museum solo in Mexico City (at the MUAC) which will travel to Buenos Aires (at the Fundacion Proa) and also a solo show at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, besides a number of other exciting pieces.
