The performance art troupe The Raqs Collective went live on YouTube last week to present a talk alongside a presentation of “31 Days,” a video piece amplifying pandemic life. The group is composed of the performance artists Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta and is based in New Delhi, India.
To behold objects in the Raqs Collective’s work isn’t to observe the curated, forced silence of the museum but to engage with time and inquiry through those objects, presented as framing devices for generating inquiry. With that said, the framing does not hold: Entropy overwhelms its sense of coherence. As a direct result, the audience is forced to stand in as an essential part of the Collective’s work — to the point of their continuous, forced engagement being vitally necessary for finding a coherent direction for the narrative.
