Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective telah mengubah jalan mereka selama tiga dasawarsa melalui praktik media, seni kontemporer, kurasi, mengajar, menulis, serta membangun ruang dan infrastruktur untuk kehidupan kebudayaan dan intelektual. Sewaktu mereka memulai pada 1992, sebagai lulusan sekolah film di Delhi, praktik awal mereka berjangkar pada film esai dokumenter. Namun demikian, melalui dasawarsa ‘90-an yang bermasalah di tengah pergolakan kepadatan perkotaan Delhi, pemikiran mereka tidak lagi dapat dituangkan ke dalam bingkai layar tunggal. Praktik mereka bergerak ke arah karya video multilayar yang dapat dilihat ke belakang sebagai antisipasi dari ketertarikan dan keterlibatan mereka di dalam bentuk kebudayaan yang berjejaring. Gambar bergerak mendobrak batasan di dalam karya Raqs dan memulai perjalanan vektor menuju apa yang disebut Raqs sebagai praktik ‘kontemplasi kinetik’.

Sejak awal 2000-an, Raqs telah terus menyelidiki waktu, proses material, ekonomi politik dari tambang, protokol tentang apa yang dapat dan tidak dapat dikatakan di dalam bahasa, serta persimpangan antara kewaspadaan, pengalaman, dan pengaruh. Praktik seni kontemporer dan kurasi mereka telah mengubah studio mereka menjadi sebuah laboratorium guna memikirkan keadaan masa kini. Hal ini, lebih dari yang lain, menandai mereka sebagai pencerita dan pembuat makna, nyaman dengan layar LED, realitas berimbuh, simulasi mekanis, dan terjemahan antara ucapan dan keheningan di dalam berbagai bahasa.

ENG

Raqs Media Collective have shape-shifted their way for three decades through media practices, contemporary art, curation, teaching, writing, and the building of spaces and infrastructure for cultural and intellectual life. When they began in 1992, as graduates from a Delhi-based film school, they anchored their initial practice in the essay-documentary-film. However, through the troubled decade of the ‘90s, located in the turbulence of the urban density of Delhi, their thinking could no longer be contained with the frame of a single screen. Their practice moved towards multi-screen video works that can retrospectively be seen as anticipations of their subsequent interest and immersion in networked cultural forms. The moving image broke its bounds in Raqs’ work and began a vectorial journey towards what Raqs have called the practice of ‘kinetic contemplation’.

Since the early 2000s Raqs has gone on to investigate time, material processes, political economies of extraction, the protocols of what can be said and what can’t be said in language, and the intersection between awareness, experience, and affect. Their practice of contemporary art and curation has turned their studio into a laboratory for thinking the contemporary condition. This, more than anything else, marks them as fabulists and fabricators of meaning, comfortable with LED screens, augmented realities, clockwork simulations and translations between utterance and silence in several languages.