Playing a plurality of roles with peculiar artistic goals

Based in the capital city of India, where it was first formed almost two decades ago, Raqs Media Collective comprises of threes talented practitioners, namely Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and Monica Narula.

They have been visible and greatly appreciated internationally for their unconventional work done in last many years. They relish playing diverse a plurality of roles, and often appear as artists, as curators, and occasionally as philosophical agent provocateurs. Here’s a quick look of their career graph courtesy Nature Morte:

• Raqs create art and films, curate exhibitions, edit books, stage events, collaborate with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and discover processes that have made deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. 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.
  
• In 2000, Raqs co-founded the Sarai Program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. They are part of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader Series. The group has exhibited their works in Documenta 11 in 2002 and the Biennales of Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Sydney and Sao Paulo, amongst others. Their work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Tate Britain (London), Art Unlimited (Basel), Mori Museum (Tokyo), SALT (Istanbul) and at the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries (London), as well as many other international institutions.
  
• Raqs curated ‘The Rest of Now’ for the 7th edition of Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art and ‘Steps Away from Oblivion’ for the international roving exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ initiated by The Serpentine Gallery, London, both in 2008. ‘Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition’, a curatorial process initiated by Raqs, is currently on at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon.
  
• The collective has embarked on an exciting trajectory, exhibiting and developing ambitious artistic and curatorial projects around the world and gathering critical acclaim as artists and thinkers, even as they remain accessible to a wider audience by telling stories, sharing their discoveries and committing themselves to a deeply dialogic ethic of work and life. Their new showcase at Nature Morte can be seen as an account of a partial itinerary of some of their many recent artistic, intellectual, and collaborative adventures.