Raqs Media Collective, Founded 1992, Based in New Delhi, India
Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Jeebesh Bagchi formed Raqs Media Collective in 1992, after they passed out of the AJK Mass Communication and Research Center, Jamia Milia University in Delhi while working together on their first, now lost, 16mm film, Half the Night Left, and the Universe to Comprehend.
Raqs Media Collective follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and exacting in its procedures. Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with time in all its tenses through anticipation, conjecture, entanglement and excavation. Conjuring figures of cognitive and sensory acuteness, Raqs’ work reconfigures perceptional fields and demands that everyone looks at what they take for granted, anew.
Raqs continue to be anchored in Delhi, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of that city. At the same time, Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances. Raqs sees its work as opening out the possibility of a conversation that embodies a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property.