Raqs Media Collective

Frith Street Gallery is please to announce an exhibition of new video, sculptural and wall-based work by Raqs Media Collective. This will be the artists’ third solo show at the gallery.

In the time when all the news that was fit to print got printed, Raqs decided to take things in hand. History, they decided, would no longer be destiny. Corrections were clearly necessary. The first draft of history would yield the next draft of whimsy. Everything and its shadow was re-run, banks were broken, trees were asked the time, and clocks followed strange instructions. The Raqs Media Collective's curiosity about what time does to the world and to our conscience lies behind the works and images that constitute Corrections to the First Draft of History - Raqs Media Collective

The central, and eponymous work in the exhibition, is formed from a selection of framed and manipulated daily newspapers collected from Britain and elsewhere. The papers’ surfaces are partially covered in blackboard paint, obliterating some sections, and isolating others. The piece is at once playful and critical, acknowledging that we encounter history through its re-writing/ re-drafting / censorship and in some cases total erasure.

Re-Run was inspired by a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph taken in pre Communist China. In December 1948, in the lead up to Shanghai’s capitulation to the People’s Liberation Army, Bresson photographed a “bank run” in the city. The image shows a crowd of people desperate to withdraw their money in order to buy gold before an imminent currency collapse. Such actions of course precipitate bank failures and so cause becomes effect becomes cause. In Re-Run, Raqs have re-staged Cartier Bresson’s photograph as a moving image. A large scale projection shows a heaving mass of figures in an unruly queue, the image is perhaps not so far from where we might be today, so the memory of one crisis is transposed onto the reading of another.

An adjacent work in the form of a large-scale analogue clock with an illuminated face provides a very vivid image of time. Clocks are a recurring motif in Raqs’ work; they use time itself as an actual concrete medium and in this piece they play with our subjective response to its passage and demands.

Raqs Media Collective are: Jeebesh Bagchi, b. 1965, New Delhi, India; Monica Narula, b. 1969, New Delhi, India; Shuddhabrata Sengupta, b. 1968, New Delhi, India. Recent exhibitions include: 2014: It’s Possible Because It’s Possible, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; A Sublime Economy of Means, tranzitdisplay, Prague, Czech Republic. 2013: Performa 13, New York City, New York; Black Box, Raqs Media Collective, Baltimore Museum of Art, USA. 2012: Where do we migrate to?, Contemporary Art Centre, New Orleans; Raqs Media Collective: The Great Bare Mat & Constellation, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale, Photographers’ Gallery, London; A Phrase, Not A Word, Nature Morte, New Delhi; The Primary Education of the Autodidact, Audain Gallery, Vancouver; Guesswork, Frith Street Gallery, London. Future solo exhibitions include; 2014: National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 2015: School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), Boston; It is Possible Because it is Possible, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, México City, México.

All images courtesy the artist & Frith Street Gallery London © Steve White 2014