PRESENTATION: Raqs Media Collective-The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone
Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work is located at the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory, often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jencks Foundation Archive
Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) follow their self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce work that demands the viewer look anew at what they take for granted. Myths and histories of diverse provenances, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property inform their diverse oeuvre. The term parallax describes an optical phenomenon, the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is observed from different angles; the experience of moving through a landscape in which the foreground changes dynamically in relation to a more static background. “1980 in Parallax” unfolds around a new commission by Raqs Media Collective and takes this phenomenon as its starting point when describing perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time – past and present – interrogating varied geographies of perceived slippages between centre and periphery. A moment with momentum, the year 1980 is both an end and a beginning. It marked the transition between key decades, bringing about momentous political and technological shifts of global significance, the reverberations of which we are still living through today. Another beginning and end – often described as ‘the beginning of the end’ – was signalled by the launch of the first ever Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. Entitled ‘The Presence of the Past,’ it famously announced Post-Modernism as the new international paradigm of architecture and proposed a canon that was to be more polyphonic. The same ideas shaped the designs of Charles and Maggie Jencks’ family home, also known as The Cosmic House, which was being detailed during this very period. The new commission “The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone” oscillates between fact and fiction while describing 1980 as a transient moment that nevertheless left a significant mark on our collective imaginaries: ‘There’s a 1980 hidden in every year.’ The tectonic of the work alludes to Post-Modern methods with pendulating views between vast eternal landscapes and historical footage that the narrator and cyclist traverse. The film’s main protagonist is the figure of the bicyclist whose circular and repetitive journey invokes an explorative and meditative mood. Using temporal and geographical zooms, shifts and overlays a contemplative landscape is created, at once personal and public. The film is extended into physical space of The Cosmic House through a set of animated topological shapes and time cones that appear and disappear on screen, and in Raqs Media Collective’s wall drawings and AR ‘interferences’ entitled “Betaal Tareef: In Praise of Off-time (and its Entities)”.
Photo: Raqs Media Collective, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (film still), 2023, © Raqs Media Collective, Commissioned by Jencks Foundation, Courtesy the artists & Jencks Foundation
Info: Curator: Eszter Steierhoffer, Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, 19 Lansdowne Walk, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 19/4-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: book your visit here, www.jencksfoundation.org/
