‘A Phrase, Not A Word’ at Nature Morte

Nature Morte at its New Delhi venue is hosting a solo by Raqs Media Collective. It features their large-scale prints, videos, a sound installation, and a typographic sculpture. After a log gap of almost six years, the much celebrated has returned to the gallery. In fact, their last show here was in August 2006.

With ‘A Phrase, Not A Word’, Raqs' diverse and eclectic practice becomes a playground for ideas and reflections on conversations and the notion of language. The exhibition will gather an arsenal of images, objects, voices, replicas, shadows and organisms, and sets them to work with and against each other in order to undertake detonations at the limits of thought.

Raqs observe the contest between phrases and words, playfully glossing a lively debate within the Sanskrit philosophical canon about how the making of meaning hinges on an explosion (the 'sphota') that marks the relationship between the formation of a thought, the naming of an object and the launch of an utterance.

On view are several works not exhibited before in India, along with a suite of new artworks! Amongst them are ‘An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale’, shown as part of their exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto in 2011 and recently at their solo show for the re-opening of the legendary Photographer' s Gallery in London. This looped video glosses a photograph taken in Calcutta in the early 20th Century by the British photographer James Waterhouse depicting the interior of a Surveyor’s office with workers earnestly absorbed by their tasks to produce a calibrated meditation on stillness, duration and transformation.

‘Strikes at Time, a video diptych, connects thoughts on time and labor sparked off by a conversation with the French Philosopher Jacques Ranciere. It entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris after being included in the exhibition ‘Paris- Delhi-Bombay’ in 2011 and is currently being shown at the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennal in Ekaterinburg, Russia.

The works ‘Forthcoming Titles’ and ‘The Philosophy of the Namak Haraam’ deal with the desire for language and its capacity to both speak and be silent. In ‘The Philosophy of the Namak Haraam’ we are all namak-haraams, defaulters to the debt of purloined knowledge, while ‘Forthcoming Titles’ undoes written ideas to tie them up in knots.

Two new works in the show, ‘Constellation’ and ‘Fibonacci's Insomnia’, have emerged from their most recent body of work created for Raqs' on-going solo show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.