Raqs Media Collective: Come Undone
Archive exhibition
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Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, curators, philosophical agents provocateurs, and catalysts of cultural processes. For their fifth exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, they present works centred around the form and idea of the knot – a leitmotif that moves backwards and forwards through their own history and practice.Many of the works in the exhibition emerge from Raqs’s commission for the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House. This resulting film, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (2023), is a poetic reflection on perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time, past and present, interrogating varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries. You can watch a short trailer for the film and hear Raqs Media Collective member Monica Narula in conversation with Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of the Jencks Foundation and The Cosmic House, at the bottom of the exhibition page.
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A series of glass knots, titled somewhat paradoxically Twisted Water (2023–24), are displayed throughout the gallery. Each knot rests on an individual small carpet, its pattern based on the shapes of Indian rivers, this in turn sits on a transparent Perspex shelf; as one moves through the gallery space, the transparency of the shelves set at varying heights, echoes the cresting and rippling of water.The vinyl record Knots and Tears (2024) provides a soundtrack for the whole exhibition. This poetic and playful meditation on knots, tears, loops and watery bodies is spoken by the artists, accompanied by the sounds of now-extinct birds, including the knot bird. With its capacity to fly incredible distances, the small knot bird has a mythological status in many cultures, and is evoked when speaking about courage and journeys.
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A knot is indicative of how closely something is bound, tied up, with itself, or with something else. As a marine measure of speed, it is also suggestive of how quickly, how speedily, something moves away. Knots link worlds of passages, transitions and departures. Knots that bind, knots that fray. Tears follow knots.
We are the knot, and sometimes, we come undone. And then, it’s back to living again, to know how to thread the rope, to tie the knot, to read the wind, and to attend to care and the cosmos.
Raqs Media Collective
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Accompanying these fragile forms that speak of all kinds of entanglements, are a series of larger floor carpets titled Archipelago (Salt in your Tears) (2024). In blue and gold, their shape and colour evoke islands in a sea, the title connects to the fact that the human body is also a body of water and the tears it produces are often more saline than the sea itself.
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I think Digitality has given us this other relationship with time. The analogue is not about the loop, the digital is about the loop, and that shift in materiality has also meant a shift in the experience of time. And that I think is really interesting because I can inhabit time in a different way, and I can inhabit space through digitality in a different way. And what that will do to us and our entire relationship with being, I don't entirely know yet, but it feels like something has shifted.
Monica Narula, Raqs Media Collective
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In Conversation: Monica Narula & Eszter Steierhoffer
Hear Raqs Media Collective member Monica Narula in conversation with Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of the Jencks Foundation and The Cosmic House on the occasion of the exhibition Come Undone at Frith Street Gallery.
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The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone, 2023 (Trailer)
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