The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs (pron. rux) follows its self declared imperative of 'kinetic contemplation' to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures.

The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Raqs remains closely involved with the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (www.sarai.net), an initiative they co-founded in 2000.

Raqs Media Collective is based in New Delhi, India.

Part of “Indian Highway”, Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Astrup Fearnley Museum (2009); Herning Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2010); Lund Konsthalle (November 2009)

Participating Artists

Debkamal Ganguly, Ruchir Joshi, Kavita Pai & Hansa Thapliyal, M.R. Rajan, Priya Sen, Surabhi Sharma, Vipin Vijay

Steps Away from Oblivion is a circuit of films, installed on screens and as projections in a confined space, that invoke different rhythms of repose and transformation.

The Raqs Media Collective invited eight documentary filmmakers to revisit key moments in their work; re-editing, re-making or re-presenting particular sequences from their films.

In The Sleepwalker's Caravan (Prologue), Raqs's own contribution to the circuit, we are greeted by the wandering figures of a yaksha and a yakshi, mythic guardians of treasure and keepers of riddles in different Indic traditions, as they traverse a contemporary landscape which the other films also portray and problematize.

Text by Raqs Media Collective.

Steps Away from Oblivion

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