"We would like to begin by taking a sentence from the formulation of the problem that set
the ball rolling for this lecture series. In speaking of the 'hesitation in developing any
kind of comprehensive strategy' for understanding precisely what it is that we call
contemporary art today (in the wake of the last twenty years of contemporary art
activity), the introduction to the series speaks of its having 'assumed a fully mature
form—and yet it still somehow refuses to be historicized as such.'"
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 218 K)
"When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes is an installation of glass cast busts mounted with heads of weighing scales."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 18 K)
"Independent urbanists, new-media theorists, social psychologists - call them what you will - the New Delhi trio Raqs Media Collective weave together poetic threads from multidisciplinary research into their lecture-performances, web platforms, films and installations."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 7.1 MB)
"The global attention that contemporary Indian art has received in recent years has been fixed on the boom in the Indian art market."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 624 K)
"Given the western artworld's current fixation with the emerging art scenes of China, India and the Middle East - both as new lures for the commercial art market and as pieces on the chessboard of cultural diplomacy - it would be easy to be cynical about the growing turnover of big group shows focusing on these increasingly active artistic hubs."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 396 K)
"Films are like landmarks. memories of watching films together, watching them again after many years on the tiny screen on the back of an airplane seat, downloading them from a film-sharing website, sharing them arguing about them, learning from them, becoming enamoured of them or indifferent to them: these are the signposts in a continuing journey..."
Continue Reading (PDF 499 K)
"Meera Menezes takes stock of the changes in Delhi's gallery scene."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 1.7 MB)
"Working with an extended family of collaborators, the Raqs Media Collective has produced some of the more interesting and less predictable art to come of the Indian subcontinent in recent years..."
Continue Reading (PDF 2.6 MB)
"Seen as a cross between an anti-capitalist, counter-espionage unit and a hip hop posse, the collective as considerable cachet in the art world today. The Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective has recently been described by Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta 11, as 'a model of the artist intellectual'..."
Continue Reading (PDF 325 K)
"Permanence and change - uncomfortable poles between which artists, cultural producers, and art institutions have to migrate - are explored through gallery works, online projects, performances, and extensive catalogue texts for 'How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.'"
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 378 K)
"The Raqs Media Collective marks a radical departure from the norms of mainstream contemporary Indian art, which is segregated by medium and style, and dominated by conventionally trained visual artists."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 365 K)
"Nancy Adajania addresses the aesthetic and political questions thrown up by the emergence, in India, of a culture built around the Internet."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 2.6 MB)
"Nancy Adajania analyses Documenta 11, which brought together 415 works by 180 artists from five continents, many of them from cultures previously not represented in mainstream global art."
-more-
Continue Reading (PDF 1.2 MB)