‘Raqs’ in Arabic, Persian and Urdu encompasses various forms of dance including Sufi whirling – a form of meditation based on movement. Since forming Raqs Media Collective in 1992, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta have taken this ‘kinetic contemplation’ as a model for their own restless curatorial and artistic practice, which extends into historiography, philosophy and sociology.
If their project sounds loosely defined, then that’s how they like it. Working between and across disciplinary boundaries, the New Delhi-based collective has made films, curated exhibitions and edited books; staged public interventions, performed lectures and founded a ‘platform for research and reflection on the transformation of urban space’; collaborated with architects, programmers, historians, writers and theatre directors; and researched and restaged the histories of communities from Shanghai to Manchester.
That resistance to categorisation, and impulse to forge connections, means that each project feeds into the next. Their current exhibition Not Yet At Ease at Firstsite, Colchester (commissioned for the 14–18 NOW programme marking the centenary of the First World War), for example, explores the psychological trauma suffered by Indian soldiers through the format of a ‘Theatre Opera’ developed during Raqs’s curating of the 2016 Shanghai Biennale. In turn, their research into the history of neurology came to inform their curatorial project In the Open or in Stealth at MACBA, Barcelona.
These are just the most easily disentangled threads from Raqs’s cat’s cradle of an oeuvre, which itself expresses the collective’s vision of the world as a complex but always interlinked network of people, ideas, places and histories.
