Press

TIME BOOK – Aveek Sen

Published on 6 February, 2015 in The Telegraph, Kolkatta

Raqs Media Collective, The Untold Intimacy of Digits (UID). Projection, video loop (1”)

“I had half a day in Delhi, last month, to see Untimely Calendar, the exhibition by Raqs Media Collective now on at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Delhi was preparing for the advent of the American president for Republic Day celebrations, and everything, especially the traffic, was in a state of oddly quiet wintry chaos around Jaipur House. Military tanks in Christo-like wrappings were parked close by. I entered the museum and realized within minutes, in a state of mounting distress, that the splendid transformation of space – museum-space and mind-space – that Raqs have made in this show, surely one of the most epochal in the history of contemporary art and thought, demanded a kind of time that I could not see myself being able to make in my everyday life at that moment. It was with this feeling of restlessness and rue – a kind of alarm that I would miss something important because of a lack of time – that I began to understand the alluringly disruptive power of the show’s eponymous ‘untimeliness’, and the possibilities of transformation, not just of space, it gestures at…”

Untimely Calendar, Aveek Sen