Raqs Media Collective 

Founded in Delhi, 1992 
Artists, Curators, Catalysts, Concept Builders.
   
Raq Media Collective have shape-shifted their way for three decades through media practices, contemporary art, curation, teaching, writing, and the building of spaces and infrastructure for cultural and intellectual life. When they began in 1992, as graduates from a Delhi-based film school, they anchored their initial practice in the essay-documentary-film. However, through the troubled decade of the 90s, located in the turbulence of the urban density of Delhi, their thinking could no longer be contained with the frame of a single screen. Their practice moved towards multi-screen video works that can retrospectively be seen as anticipations of their subsequent interest and immersion in networked cultural forms. The moving image broke its bounds in Raqs’ work and began a vectorial journey towards what Raqs have called the practice of ‘kinetic contemplation’. 
 
In early 2000 they co-founded the Sarai New Media Initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, where they helmed a media lab, edited the influential Sarai Reader Series, and initiated research programmes into the intersections of urban life, law and new media technologies. The Sarai Media Lab, under their custodianship, became a spearhead for experimentation in new media, especially in hyperlinked and net art located within a digital commons. From the early 2000 onwards, beginning with Documenta 11, their work began being exhibited in leading contemporary art venues. 
 
Since the early 2000s Raqs has gone on to investigate time, material processes, political economies of extraction, the protocols of what can be said and what can’t be said in language, and the intersection between awareness, experience, and affect. Their practice of contemporary art and curation has turned their studio into a laboratory for thinking the contemporary condition. This, more than anything else, marks them as fabulists and fabricators of meaning, comfortable with LED screens, augmented realities, clockwork simulations and translations between utterance and silence in several languages.