‘The Great Bare Mat’ by Raqs

Raqs Media Collective works have reached Boston. Their fall exhibit ‘The Great Bare Mat & Constellation’ at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum includes new works divided in two separate gallery installations. The first one features a carpet - a surface so as to stage conversations, featured at the feet of a two-fold 17th-century Japanese screen drawn from the collection of the museum.

The Delhi-based artist collective’s works engage with urban spaces as well as global circuits, welding an edgily contemporary and sharp sense of what it persistently means to lay claim to the curious realm from the street life of Delhi. It, at the same time looks to articulate an intimately lived relationship with both myths and histories of rather diverse provenances. Their work formed part of the 2012 Frieze Fair.

Raqs 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. According to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a lot of their work is rooted in terms of its context in New Delhi.

‘The Great Bare Mat’ is inspired by two exquisite Han bronze bears in its collection, mat-weights from China, which served to weigh down carpets for debaters to sit and discuss. Woven by a team of Bulgarian weavers, the carpet flaunts a repeated motif that indexes the Great Bear’s constellation against a bewildering background of essays, conversations and signals between three PCs of the artist collective.

Another installation, a press release elaborates, is a silent, looped video projection that transforms, through a series of subtle alterations, the many photographs and film stills they recorded while in residence at the museum a couple of years ago. The images of the projected video reflect onto an adjacent gallery wall, where a luminous array of shiny metal surfaces mirroring distinct narratives create a crescendo of accumulated visuals in the mind of the viewer.

The Great Bare Mat & Constellation is made possible in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.