Raqs Media Collective

About

Raqs Media Collective are three Delhi-based artists - Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta - whose practices include photography, new media, film, media theory and research, criticism and curation. An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale (2011) is a silent looped video projection of an archival photograph, subtly altered by the artists to create a dream-like mise-en-scène. The original photograph, taken by James Waterhouse, depicts a room full of surveyors in colonial Calcutta in 1911, and is titled Examining Room of the Duffing Section of the Photographic Department of the Survey of India. The Collective hope this intervention can ‘conjure a constellation of stars onto a drawing board, induce tremors too gentle to disturb the Richter scale, reveal a dreamed up desert, make time wind backwards, stain the afternoon with indigo and introduce a rustle and a hesitation in the determined stillness of the surveyors hard at work at mapping empire'. Raqs Media Collective were founded in 1992. They have exhibited widely on an international stage including Documenta 11, Germany, Tate Britain, London, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, San Francisco MoMA, and Kunst Museum, Graz. The Collective was also co-curator of the Manifesta 7 Biennale in 2008.