The sight of a hand may seem to be one-dimensional on the surface—something not worth registering in the grand vision of reality, except to know whether you’re invited or forbidden to do something. However, for the Raqs Media Collective—a collective based out of Delhi, with a presence at some of the major international art shows—this one image is worthy of a series of artistic pieces, as was shown by a December exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, Ontario. Displayed this past December, the exhibition was titled “Surjection” after a mathematical concept. By juxtaposing the hand with the idea of weights, measures, change, time, infinity, history, failures in communication, among many others, the exhibition manifested surjection: the application, transposition, and mapping of elements of a certain set onto those of another set.
For surjection to occur, something must begin to have its elements manipulated. In this exhibition, this introductory set was the installation, Re-writing on the wall. Titled after a common figure of speech—“the writing is on the wall,” which implies the impending of a negative event—this exhibit was inspired by a biblical parable from the Book of Daniel, in which the prince Belshazzar sees handwriting on a wall and calls the Israelite Daniel for guidance. Daniel ultimately informs Belshazzar that the words symbolize a weighing and measuring of his actions, and that retribution for these actions awaits. The theme of weights and measures, of accountability for one’s actions, thus begins here.
The exhibit did not delve only into the past, however, as there are modern extensions; parallels between the past and present which illustrate the idea of “asynchronous contemporaneity,” the relationship between different historical periods. This contemporaneity was shown in Untold Intimacy of Digits, a video projection of the handprint of Raj Konai, which was archived as a historical relic used to bind an agreement made between Konai and Sir William Herschel during the British occupation of India. Eventually this handprint lead to the breakthrough of forensics, which has now lead to India pursuing the creation of the world’s largest identification database, containing both handprints and iris scans.
This exhibit was purposeful, and arguably even political, in its invocation of the past, in order to address the state of the present. Raqs sees that what was once seen as an “intimacy of digits” has been reduced to being something merely enumerated, archived. Raqs thus chooses to see Untold Intimacy as what will hopefully become a memorial for the failure of India’s identification project. What interests Raqs, as critics of modernity, are failures such as these: failures to measure or quantify what are, by nature, immeasurable things, like our emotions, the time we are given, or those things, such as our handprints, which are inherently personal and unique.
These are the failures this exhibition addressed, as it depicted the hand of Raj Konai counting to infinity in perpetual motion, or when it depicted the “writing on the wall” that warns of immeasurable consequences, or when, in 36 Planes of Emotion, it used a collection of laser-engraved acrylic to place opposing collective nouns together, showing the opposition that exists in everything we feel.
By synthesizing philosophical, sociopolitical, and historical inquiry, the work of Raqs shows that the past and present are inherently linked. The betterment of humanity is not always found through a progressive agenda, but may sometimes require a look at a more grounded past.
The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs follows its self-declared imperative of “kinetic contemplation” to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.
The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Raqs remains closely involved with the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies an initiative they co-founded in 2000. Based in Delhi since its foundation, Raqs Media Collective nonetheless has a complex relationship to location. The city of Delhi is very often the subject of their work, and in their engagement with modernity they often display a lived relationship with myths and histories from South Asia and its wider region. They are, however, resistant to the label “Indian” since, they argue, it represents an abstraction so enormous that it can explain nothing about them, and prefer to talk about themselves simply as “from Delhi.” Highly sensitive to intellectual and cultural currents from everywhere else in the world, they are cynical of the language of multiculturalism, identity and nationalism and prefer to find other languages with which to narrate personal and social histories.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Jasmine Saroya
