Raqs is a Persian word. It describes the state that ‘whirling dervishes’ enter into when they whirl. It’s also a term to denote dance. At the same time, it could be an acronym for ‘rarely asked questions’...! The members have exhibited extensively in the context of large-scale international exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennial, and the Liverpool Biennial and in major art spaces such as Serpentine Gallery, the Walker Arts Center and Taipei Fine Arts Museum among other international venues.
Their talks began manifesting themselves as a way of sharing notes from research and back stories of artworks with their publics in various parts of the world: in order to tell stories, and leave them half told, with space and time for listeners to fill them in as they fancied. In conjunction with this exhibition, Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s lecture-performance was also held. Their new project at New York based efflux is titled ‘The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet’. An accompanying note mentions:
"What happens when you layer one time on to another time? Do you get two times at once, or, do you register some other, singular temporal experience, analogous to the mysteriously singular 'composite' portrait of many individuals, which is neither a sum of the parts of the photographs of many faces, nor an average but a 'new' different face, which looks as if it belonged to a unique life.By blending elements, observing mutations as and where they happen, and keenly watching on the way in which the world navigates through their triangular consciousness, they generate motives for its continuity and its pleasure.
A life never lived, but made manifest as a photographic accident. Can there be a time made of juxtapositions, a time never experienced, but made serendipitously manifest by interpretative accidents? By the careful cultivation of chance encounters in scattered archives..."
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